


I try to focus on your eyes

by pr_scatterbrain



Category: Bandom, Beirut, Cobra Starship, Fall Out Boy, Fashion Model RPF, Music RPF, Panic At The Disco, The Academy Is..., The Strokes
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Compartmentalization, F/M, Found Families, Hipsters, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mildly Dubious Consent, Multi, Pining, Ringo Starr is underrated, indie music roll call
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-27
Updated: 2012-07-27
Packaged: 2017-11-10 16:44:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/468480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pr_scatterbrain/pseuds/pr_scatterbrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An au where Spencer can't fire Brent so he doesn't. Instead Ryan fucks Brendon and Spencer sleeps next to him and Brent is a ghost. Somehow running away starts to make sense so when the tour winds down Spencer takes off and when he stops running he finds himself with Albert Hammond Jr., playing music, sleeping and talking to no-one but Agyness Deyn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I try to focus on your eyes

**Author's Note:**

> This fic would not exist without kick_back_80s. She looked over every single version of my bigbang, from the most fractured, unfinished and badly spelt draft to the fic you read today. She put up with my awful spelling and grammar, half finished sentences/scenes, unorganised ideas, and my nerves. I do not have words for how grateful I am for all of her help. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Thank you. 
> 
> I was lucky enough to get both a fanmix and art made for my bigbang fic and they both rock. I would like to thank both speep and scarytaleending for taking the time to make such fantastic mixes and art for my fic. I really do feel incredibly lucky to have received both (especially as they had to read/endure the first draft of my fic which was less a draft than it was a fractured mess). Thank you both. 
> 
> Bonus material:  
> [ The fanart.](http://pr-scatterbrain.livejournal.com/86054.html#cutid1)  
> [ The fanmix.](http://pr-scatterbrain.livejournal.com/86054.html#cutid2)  
> [ The character primer/picspam.](http://pr-scatterbrain.livejournal.com/85981.html#cutid1)

 

 

**_Part one: The Tour._ **

 

 

Ryan’s voice is a whisper when he speaks. Quick and nervous; his carefully chosen words are lost almost immediately after being spoken. It’s the sort of voice someone would use if they thought there was a chance of being overheard. There isn’t one, but it feels like there is. Spencer has to strain to listen. Spencer has to strain to listen, has to lean forward, lean closer and – Ryan is Napoleonic with his words. Already planning. Already thinking in terms of tomorrow rather than today.

“We can mange without him,” he says. “Maybe we get somebody in to cover the rest of the tour, but for recording we can manage. Brendon can play bass. We…”

Spencer doesn’t hear much after that point. He feels the warmth of their bodies crowded into Ryan’s bunk, their limbs crushed together, knees knocking and elbows touching. He sees Ryan’s hands. Pointing and moving and waving. Rearranging them into something. Something else. And Brendon’s eyes. Huge and dark; they avoid looking at anything that isn’t his fingers twisting the worn cotton of his yellow t-shirt.

Everything else is white noise really.

They draw straws, only they don’t really, because they all know when it came down to it, Spencer is the one that will do it, because apparently as well as drumming, firing Brent was part of his job description. But the thing is, he can’t. He just can’t.

So he doesn’t.

When he calls Brent he doesn’t say ‘ _Don’t come back_.’ Instead he lets Brent lie and make all kind of excuses and apologies until he runs out of words and then, Spencer lets him come back, because somewhere in between the lies and apologies he ran out of words too. But maybe it happened before then. Maybe it happened long before that.

But heck, that’s what he has Ryan for.

 

 

Spencer chooses not to think or speak much when Brent returns. Or with him. He isn’t the only one. But he doesn’t really think about that. Or bother with it. Mostly he sleeps. He sleeps and sleeps and sleeps and even when he’s awake he still feels like he’s half asleep, almost as if he’s moving underwater; the silvery water membrane like quicksand above his head, seperating him from the world around him. 

His bunk is small, and no matter what he does, light always sneaks in under the curtain, under the covers.

During the day he closes his eyes and rests his head against the cool glass windows and doesn’t watch the scenery pass by and at night he drums. He drums and at the end of the night he throws his sticks out into the audience and they scream louder.

Brent fails to show a couple more times.

Spencer doesn’t remember how many times exactly. Just, after the not first or second or third time, he forgets to call him and instead calls Jon ‘Something or Other’ from The Academy Is… entourage to fill in. And Jon does. And they play the set and they sometimes play an encore and sometimes afterwards they all go back to the bus and drink together and then when Brent turns up the next day, Spencer closes his eyes and he doesn’t really pretend to sleep, but he doesn’t really sleep either.

He doesn’t listen to Brent.

He never says anything different until he starts to say nothing at all.

Ryan’s lips are tight. Brendon has that look on his face again. His fingers are knotted in his shoelaces and his voice is too bright. Spencer can’t look at them for too long. So he doesn’t. He pulls the curtain of his bunk closed. Each day, Haley calls. Some days he answers. Sometimes he doesn’t. On certain days he looks at the screen and looks and then stops. He closes his eyes and his sidekick stops ringing eventually.

The tour moves ever onwards.

Date to date, sound check to show; then they move from one tour to another and then another. From the start of a show line up to end, and then from side stages no one goes too, to main stages at Festivals. ‘ _Exposure is good,_ ’ Pete Wentz says. He says a lot of things. Only Ryan really listens to them. Spencer doesn’t. Not really. Not anymore. Maybe not ever. He doesn’t say anything either. He just signs on dotted lines and the bus becomes bigger and the names of people playing before and after them become Names, not just names and Spencer. Spencer keeps the beat and he sleeps and sleeps.

The days pass.

One by one they pass.

Among other things.

 

 

Ryan and Brendon are fucking. Spencer knows this in the technical, sort of abstract way he knows about Dada art or the Great American political process. Or maybe he knows about in the way that doesn’t involve him thinking too much about it or anything else while he’s at it.

He sleeps a lot.

He climbs into his bunk, pulls the curtain closed and his sleeps. He sleeps and he sleeps and he doesn’t come out. Not when Brent is talking to his girlfriend, not when Zach is arguing about the stupid shit one of them said at an interview they don’t even remember anymore, not even when Ryan and Brendon are tearing each other to tiny pieces.

He sleeps.

Just sleeps.

He sleeps and he sometimes eats and in sound check he plays longer and harder than he has too and sometimes when he looks away from his kit, they aren’t there and neither is Brent but he doesn’t notice that. Usually he just looks down and notices his hands. Rough. Redden. A little swollen out of shape and he thinks, _'huh, I did that?_ '

Brendon crawls into Spencer’s bunk at night though.

After shows, after after-parties and after darkened corners and between buses moments, he presses his body against Spencer’s back and exhales warm stale air against his neck. He holds onto Spencer too; holds on and won’t let Spencer turn to face him. He smells of bars and the road and the stage and sex and Ryan and sometimes Spencer’s eyes water a little. Underneath, sometimes, he smells of Brendon and sometimes, just sometimes that makes Spencer’s eyes water more.

He can’t touch Brendon sometimes.

Usually it’s those times, but sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s just random. Like backstage. Or when they stumble out of the bus to use the gas station bathroom. Spencer just can’t. He doesn’t know why. His hands cramp up like they did back in Maryland after too many hours in the studio but when he looks down at them he doesn’t see anything wrong with them at all.

He feels old.

Old and tired and worn.

 

 

The air always feels stale in hotels.

Used.

Hotel parties mostly feel the same. Spencer drinks his way through a couple of shots, a couple of beers. Or sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he nurses one drink in his hands all evening long, until the condensation drips over his fingers and the liquid warms.

Ryan finds people at every stop to fill the room with.

Spencer never knows anyone except for the people Ryan tells Spencer he does.

Techs and other acts on the bill rotate rooms and their presence. Girls and boys from shows and others that are too cool for them fill in the blank spaces with pretty faces and painted eyes and mouths, legs encased in either bright tights or dark skinny jeans. All are familiar in some way or another.

A few years ago Spencer remembers begging for his first drum set.

It could count as like, his birthday and Christmas present combined – that was his water tight argument. It didn’t have to be great, he’d told his parents over and over again. Didn’t have to be anything like the one (ones) he has now and it wasn’t. It was a shitty thing really. Sounded kinda hollow. Almost off key. The paint was chipped and scratched before the year was out. By the time Pete Wentz came calling half of it needed replacing or at least repairing. But he’d been saving – they’d all been saving – for a recording session. One and then another and Spencer...

He still had it, he thinks. Stored in his Grandmother’s garage. Maybe.

He’s not sure.

Across the room Brendon is talking to a girl. Talking too much. His face is flushed and she looks almost bored. Or completely bored. The brightly coloured hair and torn jeans can only do so much. Brendon puts his hand on her hip. He says something else. More false bravado. She smiles with too white teeth. It isn’t coy, but it does the job. When he puts his mouth on hers, he moves the hand from her hip to breast.

Spencer cuts his eyes away.

He’s caught too many half glimpses already.

Another girl, this time with short hair and a gold tattiest tooth takes this as her cue to say something witty. She’s standing in front of him. Two other girls and a guy are next to her. They laugh. The boy looks at her from under heavy-eyeliner lashes. He looks at Spencer too. Spencer doesn’t know why. It doesn’t really matter. None of them really want him or anyone else. Even if they did, there are always more at the next town over.

Spencer looks at his hands.

When he wasn't looking, someone put a new drink in them.

 

 

That night he sleeps in Brent’s room instead of his own.

The sound of his voice talking to his girl on the phone lulls Spencer to sleep. Halfway through the night he wakes up with a crick in his neck. It is still just him and Brent. Spencer moves from the couch to the untouched bed. The worn carpet muffles the sound of his footsteps. Brent does not stir. Spencer is glad. As he gets into bed, he shivers. The sheets are cold against his skin. Breathing in and out, in and out, again and again his heart drums ever onwards. It sounds loud.

It doesn’t wake Brent though.

Eventually Spencer sleeps. When he wakes in the morning, it is still just the two of them. It is nearly seven. The bus is meant to leave in an hour. Zach told all of them at least twice the night before. But an hour really means an hour and a half on mornings like this Spencer knows. If he could, he’d close his eyes and sleep for that time. But Brent makes too much noise when he gets up for that, so Spencer copies him.

The plastic wrappers of the disposable wet pack – toothbrush, soap, mint, whatever – stick to Spencer’s fingers when he rips them open. Static electricity. It feels like a waste to give up the first shower for them.

The water is lukewarm by the time Brent gets out. It’s cold by the time Spencer is finished. Shaking out his hair, he shoves the toothbrush in his mouth and the sweater he thought he lost two states ago over his head. It smells of things that have become familiar. Something inside Spencer hisses and sparks. His hands are still. Toothpaste drips out of his mouth and down his chin. He takes the sweater off and shoves it back into Ryan’s duffle bag. He can keep the damn thing.

Brent is talking.

It takes Spencer a beat to notice and another one to listen.

He stops somewhere between waiting for the elevator doors to open and hearing them close behind him at the lobby. In the back of his mind, Spencer thinks it isn’t a loss. Brent keeps talking. Glancing out across the empty hotel foyer, Spencer thinks a few other things and keeps not listening. Brent never says anything anyway, Spencer tells himself in between half realised thoughts. Besides, that’s why Brent has a girl back in Vegas for. Or, at least, that’s where Spencer thinks she’s from. He’s not very sure. He’s met her more than once, recently even when Brent managed to get her out onto the tour for a few days.

Spencer thinks her name could be Rachelle. But it could also be the name of the tour’s drum tech.

He looks across the lobby again and into the breakfast room. It’s dark. Too early. But he leaves Ryan's bags and Brent mid sentence, to go coach the hotel's coffee machine into to life. He returns to pointed silence and he drinks his hotel coffee out of a too small hotel coffee mug.

Zach appears with Ryan eventually; Brendon races after them.

He runs like his legs are too long for him. Like they get caught up and tangled when he moves too quickly. He trips on the seam where the carpet ends and the tiled flooring begins. Zach only just manages to catch him. The fabric of the candy red jumper Brendon wore the previous night bunches up in Zach’s grip. When he lets go the fabric is stretched out of shape.

Spencer picks some bags up back off the ground and looks away.

 

 

Somewhere between state lines and county boundaries, tours and tour dates someone throws a bottle at Brendon. It practically cracks his head open. Spencer loses the beat for the first time since he was fourteen. The song turns into a discord of spitting feedback and the crack of Brent’s bass hitting the stage when he throws it aside.

“You can't take me out!” Brendon yells though. “Let's see how well you guys do with my left side!”

Then he’s up – pushing away from the techs, from them all – and singing again and his dark, dark hair gleams with the slight sheen of blood. Singing without back up, singing without them until one by one they pick back up where they left off and he is. Singing through one song and then another and then a few more without stopping once.

Spencer doesn’t find the right beat once for what little remains of the set.

All he sees is blood – more than there is, more than there really is – and his hands fail him and so does everything else. He stumbles off stage and Brendon is grinning triumphantly and Brent is swearing and Ryan is pale, so very pale and Spencer’s still holding the damned drum sticks.

In the background the crowd screams for more.

Moremoremoremoremore.

Spencer feels sick.

He feels sick and he looks at the others – at Ryan who is so fucking pale and Brent who doesn’t look back and Brendon with blood dripping across his face – and he feels sicker. Figures in black start to rush around them, then in blue and red.

“It’s okay,” says the girl, woman, the paramedic, yes, the paramedic. “It’s okay, we’re here now. We can take over.”

Spencer blinks.

Spencer is pushed back, pushed away.

He looks down. His hands are red. He looks up. The paramedic is gently removing his button down shirt from Brendon’s temple. Time has passed. He doesn’t know where it had disappeared too. The paramedic (‘ _Brendon? Brendon is it? Hi Brendon, my name is Gloria and I’m going to need you help me here, okay?'_ ) is doing something with gauze and tape and looking at his pupils and Brendon is telling her to stop, that he’s okay, that it was just a graze, that he hardly feels it at all.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Really.”

Ryan swears but Brendon ignores him and tries the other paramedic.

“Shut the fuck up,” Brent tells him. “For once, just shut the fuck up.”

Ryan’s lips tighten.

Spencer takes one step backwards, then another.

He feels sick.

He doesn’t make it to the bathroom. Holding the side of some random crate he throws up everything, absolutely everything and when there is nothing left his mind must think his body is lying because he can’t stop gagging. Shivers take hold of him and then he’s bringing up nothing but spit and bile, and his skin feels hot and cold and he still feels sick.

The band following them begins their set.

Spencer… Spencer scrubs his eyes with the back of his hands and on stage Chris Carrabba apologises for the delay Brendon had caused. They open with ‘ _Don’t wait_ ’ and the crowd screams and yells and yelps, not nearly appeased and Spencer tries to focus on breathing. He tries and he tries and he tries. But he can’t stop shaking. Can’t stop dry heaving and choking on air. He just can’t –

It takes him half an hour to stop it and return to the bus.

No one comes after him.

 

 

The Carling Weekend Festival finishes two days later. A European leg of the tour begins immediately afterwards. Brendon doesn’t miss one show. Brent does. In between their first show in Dublin and their second Brent walks out one night and doesn’t walk in the next morning.

It takes Brent two days more than it should to return to the tour.

Three days and one show – one more show – are missed. On the second day Ryan breaks one of the last remaining plates while making breakfast. He was cutting up fruit. Brendon was on the other end of the bus watching some movie they’d all seen before. Ryan reached for an apple. He turned back too quickly. The plate slipped off the counter. Spencer got milk and soggy cereal all over him when he tried to catch it.

“Shit.”

“Spence.”

Spencer shakes his hand, trying to shake off the mess; the motions were too tight. “It’s okay.”

Ryan repeats his name. Spencer thinks he should know the tone Ryan used. He doesn’t. He repeats himself. He repeats himself again when Ryan moves towards him; his dirty jeans become dirtier. Ryan doesn’t stop. He tries to use his stupid silk handkerchief as a towel. Spencer stands still.

“Ryan,” he says.

He should say something more. He knows he should. In the background there is the sound of soundstage rain and Gene Kelly. One line, then two and then Brendon joins in. His voice carries throughout the bus. It’s beautiful. Spencer pulls off his shirt.

“I’m going to change.”

“Spencer–”

“I’m going to change,” he says.

He walks around Ryan.

 

 

Spencer meets Albert Hammond Jr. by default.

It's during an awards night, in the middle of one of the tours. He can't remember which one. He hadn’t wanted to go. But that isn't the point and even if it was, it doesn’t matter because that isn’t how they are. So he wakes up on time and he puts on a suit he didn’t buy and pretends he picked it and on the red carpet he talks and smiles and stands behind Ryan and Brendon and then they’re inside.

It’s sort of like prom. Again. Or something.

Spencer blinks. His hands feel clammy by his side. He’s alone. At the first sighting of Fall Out Boy, Ryan darts off in search of Pete, while Brendon is distracted by Jon no longer ‘Someone or Other’ but Walker, or someone that looks a great deal like him, except dressed in a faux Armani tux. And Brent? Well, Spencer doesn't know where he goes half the time, and apparently this is one of those times too.

He’s alone. Except he’s not. Not really. Or not at all.

Albert Hammond Jr has one of those slow, lackadaisical smiles and when he fixes it on Spencer, fuck - it's Albert Hammond Jr and even if he had glared, Spencer would have fallen over himself to get close to him.

“I’m in a band too,” he says instead of an introduction, which is like the lamest thing ever to say to a member of The Strokes, especially since said member is Albert Hammond Jr.

Albert just smiles though, and Spencer is instantly and utterly entranced.

“So am I,” he replies. “Actually I’m in two... Or more than two. I can never really keep up with those sorts of details.”

He smiles again, this time wider and this time Spencer manages to smile back.

And since apparently Spencer is brain dead as well as the lamest person in the world he opens his mouth and instead of anything cool, he says, “I play the drums.”

Albert grins and nods. “Good choice. Drummers are like engineers.”

He nods again, if in agreement with his own statement.

“What are singers then?” Spencer asks, failing yet again to be clever.

“Whores.”

A snort of laughter escapes Spencer almost without him realising. Albert laughs too. Throwing his head back and slapping his hand against the bar.

“Want a drink?” he says, or offers, waving one hand and making a waitress appear and disappear just as quickly once their orders are taken.

Just as they recommence their conversation, the most beautiful girl Spencer has ever seen appears almost out of nothing at all. Blonde with huge blueblueblue eyes, she slides under Albert’s arm. She grins this cocksure grin and looks Spencer in the eye when she leans in to lay a kiss on Albert’s jaw. For a second Spencer forgets to breathe. She notices and her cocksure grin turns into something else that’s just as stunning and probably just as breath stealing had he any breath left to steal.

“Hello,” she says.

She looks at him very intensely.

Spencer can’t stop himself from shifting his weight from foot to foot.

She doesn’t look away. Instead she peers closer, her blueblueblue eyes narrowing and nose wrinkling.

“We have exactly the same colour eyes,” she tells him finally, seemingly fascinated by the discovery.

She turns to Albert.

“We have exactly the same eyes,” she tells him, just him, as if the fact is one that bears repeating. “Exactly.”

Around them, the crowd of Somebodies and Nobodies and Wannabees circle and sway. The evening’s program cracked into motion; the hosts - a cheerful blonde pop singer and an awkward looking comedian – started their stilted opening address. To their left, the lights on the side stage dim, ready for the first scheduled musical performance to kick into action. The time has come to find their seats, or so it seems. People laugh and start to settle, dragging with them all their borrowed haute couture and bad manners into confined spaces.

But Spencer doesn't notice any of it. At all.

He doesn’t know what to say. He knows he should say something. The months of interviews and meet and greets have taught him that. He has an arsenal of inane comments he could pull out. But Albert smiles a soft smile and the girl bites her bottom lip and looks at Spencer again. The words, so meaningless and overused, fall away.

“My name is Agyness Deyn,” she tells him. “And we’re going to be friends. I just know it.”

She holds out her hand.

He takes it.

 

 

Spencer is half awake when Brendon clambers into his bunk.

Halfway between county lines, or maybe just regional ones, his sleep muddled mind registers legs and arms and pointy bones, and, then redredred lips. Redreadred lips and blown out darkdarkdark eyes. Close and then closeclosetooclose. All at once before he’s had the chance to – to do anything at all.

“SpenceSpenceSpencer,” Brendon mumbles against Spencer’s lips. “SpenceSpeceSpencer…”

His hands touch Spencer’s skin. They are clammy and cold and Spencer jumps; startled. His body though, soon betrays him.

Afterwards Brendon tucks himself against Spencer’s back and when Spencer tries – tries – to turn, Brendon tightens his arms around Spencer body. His fingers, like the sticks from sticks and stones they were warned about as children, dig into flesh and muscle. Spencer stops. Stops trying. Whatever.

He lies there.

He lies there, facing the bus wall; he lies there.

Brendon’s breath is hot against Spencer’s neck. Hot and wet. The bunk smells of sweat and sex and it’s too small really, too small for the two of them. Spencer has grown too much. Is still growing. His limbs and joints still ache and creak, as if he isn’t his own age, but someone else’s.

The bunk is too small.

He closes his eyes. When he opens them, it is to Ryan clambering in and over him and Brendon. His eyes are hard, and his lips are tight. His body is sharper than Brendon’s. Angles and edges; a paper cut boy. His bones still press against his skin, like they are – Spencer does not know what. He doesn’t move. He just doesn’t.

Slowly, almost not at all, Spencer somehow manages to think of sleep-overs and school holidays, of parties in basements and skipped classes. Vague half hearted memories. Not even that really. Half thought out thoughts, and half remembered moments. Looks and stolen things; quickly made and quickly placed out of mind, not quite forgotten but not quite remembered.

Ryan’s body is a familiar weight against his. Spencer knows this. He tells himself this. Familiar angles and sharpness too. He manoeuvres and fits himself against Spencer and the wall and the bunk is really much too small. Spencer can hardly breathe. The air is heavy. Hot. Humid even. Spencer can no longer see the bus wall.

“Spencer,” Ryan says, but Spencer doesn’t listen. “Spence,”

The bunk is too small for them.

Much too small.

He stops thinking about it.

Ryan nuzzles his face closer and presses his lips against Spencer’s. His mouth is dry and his breath is stale. He kisses are questions. Inquisitive and familiar. They’ve done this before. Spencer makes himself kiss back. Ryan makes a sound. Spencer feels hollow. Hollowed out. Bottomed out. Ryan’s fingers flutter over his check bones, mouth - his breath stutters.

Brendon’s breath is short and comes in puffs against Spencer’s neck.

He closes his eyes again.

Ryan kisses each lid.

Spencer doesn’t think.

He sleeps.

The bus bumps and roars beneath him.

 

 

When he wakes up Ryan is gone. So is Brendon. Spencer closes his eyes again.

Time slips through his fingers until somehow it is noon and the bus has stopped. A parking lot this time; a hotel not a club. The doors open with a shudder of hydraulics and the air that rushes in then is fresh while the light is bright. Somewhere between the first gig and one season has turned into another and Spencer wonders when. Was it in Ohio or Maine, the first legs of the tour or the third?

Brent’s duffle catches Spencer’s ankle as he drags it past.

“Sorry,” he mumbles.

Spencer blinks.

He can’t remember the last time he spoke to Brent.

He can’t really be bothered thinking about when, so he doesn’t.

Some of the techs are laughing, cigarette smoke curling up above them. Scatterings of scene girls and boys litter the parking lot. All dark eyes, neon leggings and stolen motifs that already look over used. Zach makes a face and grabs Spencer’s arm. Not his bag through. Spencer has to carry that into the lobby all by himself. Brendon doesn’t. But he never does. Zach catches Brendon before the fans do.

“Pace yourself man,” he says, or something to that effect.

Spencer turns away.

Ryan already has the room cards in his hands. Or his. And apparently Spencer’s too. Brent is on his mobile. He turns his body away when Spencer looks at him for too long. His tone changes too. Spencer thinks things he shouldn’t think. It doesn’t mean much though. He turns away too.

Late that night, he wakes when Ryan slides under the covers.

An exhaled breath becomes a kiss.

Spencer doesn’t remember how.

He doesn’t remember much really.

 

 

Sometimes time doesn’t just slip, but jump. State to state, country to country and it’s hard to keep up.

He wakes one day and finds it’s a press day. He isn’t sure which, or for what, but he is dressed on time and in the car before any of the others. He is never the one Zach has to worry about. Never. The others are late. Spencer pulls out his iPod after a while. It takes a few minutes for him to figure out the battery is flat. It takes a few minutes more to put it back in his jacket pocket.

Brendon is there by then; hanging over the front seat, seatbelt forgotten. Waving his hands and making his mouth shape into a pout he started in on the driver, his hand constantly creeping towards the radio and the air conditioning buttons and anything and everything on the dashboard.

“I just want to hear the news,” he says, all doe eyes and teenage smiles.

“No.”

“Come on…” he pleades, stretching out the vowels.

“No.”

The driver is firm. But that doesn’t stop Brendon from trying. Spencer looks out the window and then wound it down. There is no traffic on the road. None at all. The street lights are still out even. The traffic lights turn red. The driver slows the car to a halt. Every street corner looks the same. The traffic lights turn green. The car moves forward.

Spencer turns his head a little.

The street corner slipps from view. Tar and street lights swallow it up. Spencer watches it happen again and again. Again and again until the car turns off the road and into the underground parking lot. Then he stops. He winds his window back up, unbuckles his seatbelt and opens his door and gets out. His sneakers squeak on the polished concrete ground.

Some guy from the label or the radio takes over where the driver leaves off. 

He takes them up to the studio; grey carpet, the smell of cheap coffee and band posters. P.R and marketing. Spencer glances over to the empty office cubicles. All the same really. The green room was too. A pot of cheap coffee, some food and then no food once Brendon finishes and someone from somewhere telling them what to say even though it’s all been said before and then just before they go in for said interview someone else is telling them to watch the wires and to not touch anything, not anything at all, without permission or, strike that, touch nothing, not even with permission.

Brendon looks flushed.

Spencer does not know what he was doing. But he must have done something (he shouldn’t have).

It's all the same really.

“It’s seven thirty four and today we have Brendon Urie and Spencer Smith with us at…” the radio host drones on, reciting the usual states; station name, catch phrase and one of a dozen or so interchangeable (occasionally backhand) compliments.

Brendon buzzes, unable to stay still in his seat.

The time on Spencer's watch is an hour late. A time zone or two old. Spencer looks at it and misses the first two questions. But that’s okay. Interviews, whether they are for radio, print, or TV, are all the same give or take a few questions and those questions are never directed at Spencer so after awhile they blur together.

Brendon smiles though, always, and he looks all of fourteen.

None of the questions are ever really for Spencer. Even the ones that are, are really about Brendon or Ryan. Spencer gets it. He does. He does not ask why he’s never sent out with Brent or on his own. He does not need to.

The interviewer, a girl named Rosie or Daisy or something, stops asking questions and puts on a track.

It isn’t one of theirs.

Spencer reaches for his bottle of water.

He moves too quickly with too little care and hits his knee on the edge of the desk. He swears. The interviewer and Brendon pause. Spencer must have interrupted something. Brendon laughs loudly, and says something charming to cover it. It stops being charming after a few minutes and Spencer forces himself to interrupt. Brendon always says too much.

The girl gives him a look.

It’s familiar.

Spencer makes himself smile.

It isn’t charming. Not at all. But it’s better than telling her to fuck off. Brendon steals what’s left of Spencer’s water. They go into another song. It’s one of Brendon’s favourites. Or one of Patrick and Pete. There isn’t much of a difference. Brendon sings along nonetheless.

The girl stops giving that look.

Afterwards she gives Brendon her number. They start to talk. She smiles. He tells a lame joke. She laughs.

Spencer waits for him in the car.

They’re late for their next interview.

 

 

They are in Pittsburgh when Albert calls. At least Spencer thinks that’s where they are. He isn’t sure. All he knows is they’re on the end straight of the tour and unless they decided to go on yet another one, home is within sight. Or so he assumes. He doesn’t really think all too much about home or what it will be like after the tour finishes. Usually he just votes yes when Pete or Patrick or someone in management offer them another gig and then doesn’t think any further past that point.

It’s always best to keep things simple.

Albert’s voice sounds like a ramble even though he doesn’t ramble. “Matt broke his arm.”

Spencer doesn’t know a Matt, but he feels he should commiserate, so that he does.

Albert thanks him.

Spencer looks out over the edge of his bunk into the tour bus. No one else is there. His insides feel like they could echo. He half wonders where Albert got his number. He hadn’t given it. Not to Albert Hammond Jr or Agyness Deyn. Other people know it though. The list of contacts on his mobile is much longer than it perhaps should be.

“Agy got it from Alex,” Albert says.

Spencer knows a lot of Alex’s. He isn’t sure he knows one that would be acquainted with Agyness Deyn.

Idly, he considers dinner. If only for something to do. He’s almost certain he could get Zach to let him go to McDonald’s or some other fast food place. If not, then craft services. Spencer was pretty sure there’d be a craft services. It was like a festival or something this tour. Craft services was like, mandatory for festival gigs.

Albert agrees.

But then he repeated himself. “Matt broke his arm. His right one.”

“Oh,” Spencer replies; not sure if he’s allowed to repeat himself or not. “Is he right handed?”

“No.” Albert says. “He’s my drummer.”

Matt. As in Matt Romano.

Spencer repeats himself but with a different tone. “Ohh.”

“Yeah,” Albert mumbles now that Spencer’s got that part of what he’d said.

“How long is he out?”

“A few months. Maybe three. Maybe four. We don’t know.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah,” Albert says.

They don’t speak for a moment.

Spencer thinks a little more about getting something to eat. Something unhealthy and made with lots of red meat.

“So anyway, I need a drummer. Want to come play substitute?”

Spencer doesn’t have to think about his answer.

Not even for a second.

Maybe that’s telling.

Or maybe it’s isn’t.

He doesn’t really think a lot about anything nowadays.

 

 

Spencer tells Ryan about Albert’s offer three weeks later over coffee while they wait for the others.

Ryan squints into the sun and shrugs.

Spencer doesn’t know what to say, so he says he accepted it even though it was pretty clear from everything he said, that he had. Ryan shrugs again. His tiny, tiny shoulders rise and fall with each motion. Spencer looks away. The lobby is empty. He woke up earlier than usual. He looks down at his watch. His wrist is bare. He must have forgotten.

Ryan shrugs again. “Okay.”

“It’ll just be for a few months.”

Ryan takes another sip of coffee.

Spencer thinks about explaining how they were going to be stopping, how they were going to take a break after so many months (years) touring, and that he’d be back right in time for when they were going to start working on the second album. Promise. Pinky Promise. He knows he should. Ryan has this thing about not sharing Spencer, and he has never really managed to fully grow out of it. Ryan has many ‘things' though. Spencer knows he should say something nevertheless. Something so Ryan does not do many of the things he does. But when Spencer opens his mouth he can’t seem to make any of that come out.

“So, yeah,” he mumbles.

Ryan nods and looks out across the lobby.

It’s still empty.

“Yeah.”

And that, is that.

 

 

**Part two: Albert Hammond Jr. Tour.**

 

 

It’s almost strange how one tour ends, and then another starts. Spencer is left between baggage carrousels and taxi pick up points by Zach. He gets picked up by Rich, Albert’s tour manager around the same place at a different airport a few hours later and deposited at the start point of the new tour. And that’s where it begins anew.

Or that’s what Rich says with a wiry ‘seen everything before’ grin on his face.

Spencer gets the feeling Rich says a lot of things.

He tries to say a few things back. Tries not to come across like he knows he can, when he isn’t careful. Afterwards, at the hotel room, Spencer isn’t sure how he fairs. He doesn’t have much time left over to think; the next day the new itinerary begins. Once on board and part of the Albert Hammond Jr. machine, he learns new names, songs, dynamics and breaks up with his girlfriend.

“I’m sorry,” he says because he is, he truly is.

Haley doesn’t hang up on him, but he can tell she wants too.

“Hales…”

“Don’t,” she tells him.

Spencer doesn’t.

She lets out a sob.

He hangs up on her.

It’s weak and wrong, but he does.

 

 

The first of the many tours or legs of the tour is with Bloc Party. When Panic first began to headline tours, Bloc Party had been booked to open for them. Spencer hasn't seen or heard from any of them for ages. 

“We meet again Spencer James Smith the Fifth,” Kele Okereke laughs when they spot each other.

“That we do.”

“I’ve got to go find the others and let them know. Gordon will fucking cream himself. I mean, fuck, a Panic! boy of our very own!”

“Shut up,” Spencer says.

“You don’t mean that.”

The set of Spencer’s mouth loosens and then shapes itself into an almost smile. “Probably not.”

Kele gleefully grins, “Good enough for me. But not Matt. Matt will probably cover himself in good luck charms just in case.”

He grins a little more and then laughs suddenly as if he can’t believe Spencer is really here after the disastrous mess their last attempt at touring together turned out to be.

“Fuck,” Kele swears, his eyes dancing. “Albert always has the best friends.”

He’s called off soon after that by one of his own set of minders, but Spencer doesn’t mind. During their sound check he sits in the empty stadium and listens. It’s been so long since he listened to anything that wasn’t on his iPod. Every song sounds new to his ears. They shouldn’t. But they do.

At the end of the practice set, Spencer finds himself with a headache.

He goes back to the bus and lies in his bunk.

Everyone’s starting a new tour but him.

 

 

The crowds are different.

They look a little the same, they even feel a little the same, but they aren’t like the Panic crowds. Maybe they’re not even Albert’s crowds – this leg of the tour he’s an opening act or Eric Clappton, not a headlining one – but he’s the master of it all. Calm, with almost a lazy charm that woos and disarms, he is so fucking good at what he does. Spencer doesn’t have words to express it.

Albert is the master of it all. And he doesn’t even look people in the eye.

Other people do that for him. Sometimes Josh Lattanzi, the worldly and very well seasoned bassist, does it just to hear his own voice. Or tell old stories with no real point, or end. Sometimes there’s a punch line somewhere in the midsts of if all. Most of the time it’s one only he gets, but everyone seems to laugh with him so when Spencer can be bothered he starts doing that too. He grins while doing it. He uses his eyes too. Albert lets him. He smiles, and lets him.

Spencer feels like the youngest kid in the room.

He’s not used to the feeling.

He had spent the week before the tour officially began listening to Albert’s music and leaning it off by heart. Drum line, drum beat. He breathes, eats and sleeps _Yours to Keep_. Every single song becomes a new piece of muscle memory. Each song reminds him how to play music Ryan didn’t write. At the end of each day his hands are left cramped and swollen, but by the final day of that week he knows Albert’s music and the first time he joins one of their practices, he doesn’t make a single mistake.

Everything is so different, yet exactly the same.

Marc Philippe Eskanazi, one of the guitarists, likes to tune his guitar with his back turned away from everyone else. If he can, he likes to tune it and warm up completely separated from the rest of the band. When he can, the others, in particular Albert, always keeps one eye on his leather jacketed back. When he can’t, Marc disappears and doesn’t turn up until they’re just about to walk onto the stage.

It’s almost familiar.

Only it isn’t.

Not at all.

 

 

At nights, after the shows are finished and everything is packed away they go out rather than stay in. Spencer’s still underage, but shanty towns made up of buses, vans and techs with quick fingers and bored minds have long made that distinction a meaningless one. It isn’t any different. This time Josh Lattanzi, the drunk and bass player of a million and one bands, takes the role others have played before; taking huge glee from making all kind of jokes Spencer has heard before and a couple he wishes he hadn’t at the expense of Marc (who for some reason has had his mother hen sensibilities brought out by Spencer’s presence), before delivering a glass or two of something that might be beer but could be something else much harder.

Albert lets him.

Standing by the bar he nurses a half empty glass of Guinness. Spencer stands next to him and together they watch everyone else. They see Rich yawn and Marc leave early, Josh flirt with a drum tech and the drum tech flirt with someone that isn’t Josh.

Spencer thinks he’s seen it all before.

He thinks he doesn’t know these people, not really, not at all, but he’s seen this all before.

He thinks he shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t see this.

It gives him a headache.

 

 

Two days later, they play a gig in Ireland.

Together Spencer and Steve Schiltz, the guitar player and denim jacket wearer, play a game of cards outside the dressing room while everyone else smokes inside it. Steve never wins. Spencer thinks he might be cheating. He can’t remember the rules. It doesn’t feel fair. Smoke starts to sneak out from under the door. Albert must be nervous.

The opening act is already drunk.

Spencer doesn’t remember what it was like. He never had to make a name for himself. The band got one without gigs like this. The opening act start playing a cover of a Beatles song; Steve makes a face.

“They’re singing the wrong words,” he mumbles.

Spencer wins another game. “Yeah.”

“Fucking kids,” Stave says, then he grins. “No offence.”

Spencer makes himself smirk. “None taken.”

He shuffles the deck and deals out the new game.

He wins that one too.

The show isn’t bad that night. It isn’t good either. It just isn’t one that anyone will remember. Spencer offers to help pack his set up. Instead of being helpful he trips over some cables. The techs get that certain look in their eyes. Spencer’s knees sting. His hands do too. They have another show tomorrow. He feels like an idiot. He feels like a kid.

The others – Steve and Josh, Rich and Marc – don’t notice.

Albert does. Albert in his white three piece suit, wingtips and 1985 '70s reissue Olympic White Fender Stratocaster. Albert who is and isn’t the guy Spencer saw on music magazine covers and top 40 count downs when he was a kid in Las Vegas, and Spencer doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, doesn’t know why the fuck Albert called him of all people – fuck, he still doesn’t even know how Albert got his phone number.

Spencer's knees sting and his hands looked fucked.

Spencer feels like a lie. He feels like a fucking lie. A fucking livejournal, myspace lie. He doesn’t know the first thing about anything. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t deserve to be here. Fuck, he still lives with his parents. He’s on tour with Albert _Fucking_ Hammond Jr and he still lives with his parents and he fucked his hands up by tripping over cables they’d all been told a million times to watch out for.

Albert says his name once, then twice.

Spencer has to make himself look up.

Gently, without exactly doing or saying anything Albert takes Spencer away from the others and over to the bar. No one notices. They keep packing up and the opening act, the drunken Beatles singing opening act, keeps joking with Josh and Steve keeps trying to make Marc laugh and no one notices that their fill in drummer is slacking because he didn’t watch where he put his fucking feet.

“Sorry,” Spencer says, though he’s not sure why.

“You don’t have to do any of that,” Albert tells him.

“Maybe I should.”

Tapping the bar counter, Albert runs a hand through his hair.

“You’re not the lucky one,” Albert tells, his eyes dark and intent. “Don’t ever think that.”

Spencer doesn’t know how to answer. So he doesn’t.

The bartender places two drinks before them.

One is lemonade.

“Fuck you,” Spencer says, without any spite in his voice, because he knows what Albert is doing.

Albert merely smiles that smile of his. “Fuck you for thinking Ringo Starr ever rode anyone’s coat tails.”

There is no spite to his voice, nothing even close to it. His eyes are kind and the hand that touches Spencer’s elbow soft.

Spencer feels tired. So very tired.

Later, afterwards, Steve makes them all sing the right words on the bus ride to the hotel. Spencer closes his eyes and falls asleep between chorus lines. Josh wakes him with stupid drunk jokes about him being a Wings fan. Steve laughs. The motley crew of musicians, tech crew and label people crowded onto the bus don’t seem to care. They’ve already moved from Beatles to food and liquor. Or just liquor. Albert looks up from his ratty book of crossword puzzles though.

“Be nice to Ulysses,” he warns.

“I am nice,” Josh claims. “I so, totally am. I’m like a paragon of a gentleman.”

Spencer snorts.

Josh makes a gesture involving one finger and an unimpressed look.

“There,” Albert says. “That’s what happens when you don’t treat people how you would want to be treated.”

Josh redirects the whole finger/facial expression one person over. “Fuck you St. Hammond Jr. the fucking Pure and Shit.”

“I love you too,” Albert laughs, eyes alight.

He catches Spencer’s eyes; when he smiles, smoke escapes his mouth. His smile turns into a grin when Josh leans across the table to press a sloppy kiss to his cheek.

Spencer laughs.

 

 

Albert and the others do a lot of press. Albert does the most for all the obvious reasons. The others – Steve, Marc, Josh especially – do their share too, but Albert always does the most. However Albert is Albert. Spencer doesn’t really notice the difference too much except on the days Albert’s fiancé Agyness Deyn is there. On the other days sometimes he spends the time he’s alone sleeping, or sometimes fucking around with the drums or annoying whichever band member escaped the endless interviews and media showdowns.

When Agyness is there he spends the time with her while she (they) wait for Albert to finish.

“They never want to let him go,” she mutters, side stepping a puddle as she and Spencer meander around the no-where town.

“Yeah.”

She smiles at him, as if he said something terribly clever.

The effect is brilliant.

“I knew you’d understand Spencer Smith.”

No one else notices when they meander out of the arena and into the no where towns and unimportant cities, not really. Spencer not anywhere as interesting as Albert, not even on a good day. Sometimes, on the rare occasion some local station does care about the lone Panic! boy in their neighbourhood, he’ll get called in to do his part, but mostly he doesn’t.

“Their loss is my gain,” Agyness smiles in that brilliant way of hers and together they’d hold hands and look though op shops and weird dusty second hand stores and step around – not in – puddles. It wasn’t too bad really. Not at all. Sometimes they’d each chip in and buy old puzzles or games to fill in the rest of the afternoon. There was always a piece missing. Always.

“That’s the charm of it,” she tells him, all earnest blueblueblue eyes and scuffed shoes.

Spencer doesn’t have a reply. Maybe he should have one; something clever and maybe a little too sharp, stored somewhere safe and secure in the back of his mind. But he doesn’t. Not even something lame or stolen from another source. But Agyness never minded when he didn’t, so somehow it was okay.

When they leave wherever they are at that particular point in the tour, sometimes he gets up early and drop the finished puzzle back outside the charity shop. Sometimes though, he forgets to set his alarm and sometimes he sleeps though it and doesn't. On those times he takes it and leave it somewhere else. A thrift shop two hours or eight hours away. Another hotel. Josh’s bunk. Wherever. It doesn’t matter. By then Agyness is usually back and together they’d set off once more.

Once, on one of the rare press appearances Spencer is asked to attend – MTV somewhere – with the others, he returns with a migraine and a clenched jaw to find her with a used table tennis set she discovered for them. Josh and Steve go fucking crazy over it. They make everyone form teams and play each other tournament style.

Albert never wins, but neither does Spencer.

But that doesn’t stop them or anyone else.

 

 

Spencer meets Gemma Ward in some city he doesn’t remember. He does remember they meet backstage briefly before the set, and then again, afterwards. He remembers that he’d played well that night. Or, at least, he thought he had.

She’s one of Agyness’s friends.

Agyness has a lot of friends though, so he doesn’t really get the chance to talk to Gemma, really talk to her until later.

She’s tall (they’re all tall though, Agyness’s model friends), and beautiful, though he realises almost immediately that he will never be able to use that word to her face. After so long on the runway and in glossy magazines, the word had lost all of its meaning to her. It wouldn’t insult her. She’d be polite about it, maybe blush or maybe shrug it off. But it would colour everything that he’d say after it.

Something about her is doll-like. He likes it, and after a few hours of talking at some bar that Agyness insisted they all go to, he discovers he likes her too. He surprises everyone, including himself when he kisses her goodbye and asks if he can see her again. Her cheeks tint the prettiest pink at his words and his heart speeds up when she nods and allows him to exchange numbers with her.

They go on a total of five dates before he has the courage to kiss her again.

When he does, they’re standing next to Constantine’s Arch, in Rome. He takes her hand and she holds it tight and when he kisses her, he knows he’s going to remember the moment for the rest of his life. He knew that before, that’s why he made sure they were standing next to Constantine’s Arch when he finally crossed that line. He wants her to remember it too. Or to have something more to remember. Too many moments of his life are a blur. Forgotten in a mess of hotels and bars and clubs and diners that all look a like and all leave him numb, and Gemma, Gemma doesn’t deserve that. Things matter with her. Gemma deserves something she can hold onto and look back on. Spencer wants to give her that, if he can. He wants to try either way.

It’s new.

So, they go on five dates, and when they kiss, it’s not perfect but it’s good and when she smiles against his lips, something warm and bright pushes up against Spencer’s ribs and makes him kiss her with a smile on his face too. Sure, it takes seven more dates before they both have the courage to go further, but that really was never the point with them.

They talk on the phone a lot. Sometimes he call her and sometimes she call him and sometimes Spencer can’t remember who had called whom, they’d just be talking to each other. She has a really nice voice. It is kind of small, kind of sweet too. He likes it. He likes her too. He more than likes her. A lot more than likes her, actually, if he is going to tell the truth.

 

 

Sometimes he thinks Gemma is too much like him.

Sometimes he doesn’t think that at all.

But when he does, he really does think she is. Of all the people in the world, he thinks she doesn’t deserve to be like that. If he could he wishes he could tell her everything everyone has told her too many times before and have her believe it. He reads lines with her instead. Helps her memorize them for auditions and then later, the next time she visits, helps her forget about non-existent call backs the best he can.

He steals all the spare time he can to see her. She does the same. Due to the nature of her work, she usually steals more. When she visits the tour, she arrives with only hand luggage and a mobile that is nearly always ringing. She hardly ever answers it, and every morning he wakes with her there he finds himself thinking she should never leave.

Without the airbrushing there are dark purple circles under her eyes. He traces them with the lightest of light fingertips. Bracken brown eyelashes flicker against his skin when she closes her eyes. Together they whisper and together they share secrets. She makes it feel like it had been forever since he had used his voice. She makes so many things feel like that. He doesn’t know how to explain it really. It’s like she tells stupid jokes that make her laugh and always looks slightly surprised when he laughs too, and Spencer, well, whenever she’s gone he notices it.

“I missed you too,” she tells him as they stand around in the gas station parking lot.

She takes his hand in hers.

The early morning sun shines down on them; lemony yellow and sweet.

Spencer’s heart does something.

She smiles at him, and he wishes he could call her beautiful, because she is. He settles for telling her he missed her too.

“You already said that.”

His cheeks heat. “I meant it.”

She blushes too.

(They look anywhere else but at each other).

 

 

Agyness appears every now and then like clockwork.

Sometimes she comes and stays for days, sometimes a week or two, while other times she can only manage a night between modelling jobs. It doesn’t seem to matter either way. She’s always around in some way or another. Phone calls and text messages, emails and packages arriving via overnight mail. Her bright smile and brighter eyes are as much of the tour as Albert is.

She kidnaps Spencer in Barcelona.

“We’re going out today,” she tells him as she drags him outside the arena and into the sunlight.

“Can I come too?” Steve asks.

Agyness sighs.

(Behind them, Marc is following too).

“This isn’t exactly what I had in mind,” she tells them.

“But we can come? Right?” Marc queries.

And then the whole band is coming. Drunk Josh, who is telling another tale they’ve all heard before, hungover Rich with his mandatory blackberry and some of the opening act too. Agyness makes a face and turns to Albert in order to complain properly when the final head count is in.

“Albert…” she whines.

Albert just grins his slow, easy grin and looped an arm around her shoulders.

And that is that.

 

Sometimes Gemma calls and asks where he is, or where he’d be a few days later.

When she does, Spencer gets used to seeing her a few days later.

Once Gemma calls and asks a different question.

“Ask me where I am,” she says, her voice stilted, more air than anything else.

“Where are you?”

“Paris," she breathes.

He is on a flight less than an hour later.

He only has around twenty hours. Maybe one or two more if he misses the sound check. The city is dark when he arrives and it had been dark when he’d left, but the two were the exact opposite of each other. Morning and night. Time zones tie Spencer up in knots. Rather than figuring them out, Spencer sleeps on the flight over. He doesn’t dream or awake refreshed.

Gemma doesn’t answer her mobile the first time he calls her upon arrival.

The second time she does, something inside him fractures when she tells him where she is and nothing else. On the taxi ride to her, he holds his mobile to his ear and listens to her stop start stuttering breathing. Traffic surrounds him. An ambulance roars in the distance. The night sky gleams; a mess of clichés and thousands of pretty blue lights.

Spencer listens to her and when she opens the door to her hotel room he puts his arms around her.

Together they stand like that in the dark hotel room, the door half open behind them. Behind them, a couple in the hallway start to argue. Gemma flinches when they move past her doorway. Spencer hooks his foot around the door and slams it shut. The action leaves him a bit unsteady for a moment. In union, their two bodies sway. Spencer holds her tighter and waits and waits and waits until her breathing starts to match his.

“It’s stupid,” she whispers; her voice muffled against his shoulder.

“It’s not,” he whispers back.

Slowly, perhaps a little like the person he never had the chance to be, Spencer brushed her hair away from her face and looks into her jade green eyes. Her golden hair gleams a little in the light. He doesn’t know what happened; he doesn’t know if anything happened at all. She tries for a smile – something reassuring, something to take the edge away from the moment – but before it is realised, it falls apart. Her eyes dart away.

“It’s okay,” he tells her. “It’s okay.”

She shakes her head. Her breathing changes again. A rattle crawls up into it. Though her eyes are not damp, she drags her hand across them decisively. "I’m sorry. I know you have the tour and shows and–”

Unable to finish the thought, she brakes the sentence off abruptly. There are many things Spencer knows he can say. None of them leave his lips. Carefully, ever so carefully he takes her hand in his and tugs her back against his chest. Barefoot, she is a little shorter than him and now, without the make up or any of the trappings she – she is just a girl.

He hold her until she lets him go.

“When do you have to be back?”

“Soon.”

Gemma sighs. “Okay.”

When the time comes for Spencer to leave, Gemma accompanies him to the airport. Shrugging into an oversized coat, she hushes any words of disagreement he might have voiced before he can voice them. Holding his hand she takes him back to the airport; down through the ostentatious hotel hallways, through the traffic and back into the airport.

“I want to,” she says when he tries to stop her.

“Gem…”

“No,” she smiles, sadly, sweetly. “I can’t come back with you alright. So I don’t care about looking like shit at work today.”

He waits at the gates for as long as he can. He tries to talk; tries to tell her jokes and stories. They all feel unfamiliar; stolen from someone else or overused. But he tells them just to say something. For her, just for her, and when the time came for him to get onto his flight, he kisses her goodbye and hopes it's enough.

He makes the sound check for the next show.

(But he wishes he didn’t).

 

 

Sometimes, just sometimes, he can’t remember whether he really wanted it; that crappy drum set with the dinted snare drum. He looks back and sometimes, just sometimes he can’t remember why he begged and begged to get one. Why drums? Why wasn’t it a guitar, or even a base? He just doesn’t know.

“How many people have you toured with Spencer Ulysses Smith?”

Looking up from his worn paperback novel Agyness had bought him from a second hand bookstore three cites back, Spencer shrugs. Albert hums.

“I don’t know.” Spencer answers finally, because he doesn’t.

“Why?”

Spencer knows he should put his book aside, but he doesn’t. He grips it and looks at the words and Albert hums a little more and the other guys keep watching TV and reading their own books and Spencer wonders why he doesn’t remember. He could, if he tried, probably remember who he toured with. But band names are different to people’s names, but even then, well, Spencer should put the book aside – Albert is still watching him, still humming too – but he doesn’t. He looks down at those words and those dog-eared pages and gives an answer that is more like an excuse.

“They all blur together after a while.”

Albert hums a little more.

Spencer looks at his book.

The words on the page don’t make any sense.

 

 

Ryan’s father dies when Spencer is in Sweden.

Ryan’s father dies when Spencer is in Sweden and Ryan is in America.

Ryan’s father dies when Spencer is not with Ryan and Ryan is not with him.

Spencer catches three flights and two taxies within a day. He arrives in Las Vegas before dawn. He finds Ryan in his bedroom and Spencer cries when he holds him, because he knows Ryan can’t. Spencer holds him and a few days later dresses in a suit someone else bought him for an event that is completely different to the funeral of his best friend’s father.

A blonde girl holds Ryan’s hand that whole fucking awful day. She says her name is Keltie and that she and Ryan have been dating for a while.

“Oh,” Spencer says in return.

He can’t remember the last girlfriend Ryan had, but he thinks she wasn’t like this girl. He also thinks other things slowly, one by one. The girl – Keltie, really is pretty and is a dancer (apparently she danced in one of their tours). She probably is a whole lot of other things too. But Spencer doesn’t expend any effort finding out. Agyness calls in the afternoon, an hour into the wake and Spencer doesn’t know what to say so he tells her that.

“Is she prettier than me?” Agyness asks, and he knows what she’s doing, he does, he really does and his heart maybe does something but he’d never admit it.

Instead he walks outside and stands in Ryan’s backyard and looks at the over grown grass and tries to breathe. He tries very, very hard. The phone line crackles and Agyness talks and talks. She tells him about the band and the gig he missed and how Josh was an arsehole to everyone and how Steve is, like, totally moping, and about the last shoot she did and her new hair cut and she doesn’t stop talking until he can breathe again.

“It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” she tells him. “It wasn’t.”

“I know,” he says.

She makes a soft sound. Maybe just exhaling against the receiver. Spencer doesn’t know. He’s so far away from her it could be either. It could be anything. He’d never know. Except he does. Because it’s Agyness. He releases a lungful of used air and forces himself to breathe in a new batch. He repeats the whole thing and then again until it starts being a muscle memory thing again.

“It is okay,” she whispers before she hangs up. “It’s okay to be sad and to feel guilty, but you’re there now Ulysses. You’re there now and he’s not alone.”

 

 

Spencer takes Ryan back with him.

He…

He just takes Ryan back.

After everyone has left the wake, Spencer goes inside Ryan’s father's house – Ryan’s house – and throws their stuff together and calls a taxi.

At the airport he goes to calls Agyness, then changes his mind and calls Albert instead.

“I’m at the airport,” he says.

“Spence, there’s no rush. Take a few more days.”

Spencer closes his eyes. “I’m bringing him with me.”

Albert sighs.“Good.”

Spencer’s eyes feel scratchy and he thinks his hands might be shaking a little. “I’m okay. You don’t have to worry about me.”

Albert laughs; Spencer has never heard anything sound so unlike what it should.

“I’m okay.”

The flight is announced.

He tells Albert.

“Good,” Albert repeats. “Come back to us.”

 

 

Ryan spends almost a month on tour with them.

He doesn’t say much and no one really says much to him. Marc lets him watch when he tunes his guitar though and it’s a gesture that makes Spencer feels like – he doesn’t know.

At nights they share a room and sometimes share a bunk and sometimes a bed.

Sometimes Ryan talks and sometimes he doesn’t.

After gigs, Ryan sometimes makes out with girls and sometimes with guys. Sometimes he fucks them. Sometimes they fuck him. He tries a whole lot of things and sometimes if those things include the times he crawls into Spencer’s space and makes it his own no one comments. Not even Albert.

Agyness doesn’t visit during that month.

She calls though. So does Gemma.

He talks to then behind locked bathroom doors and in darken arena corners. He listens to them tell him about their days and their weeks; about Gemma’s roommate Lily Cole who Gemma adores but who sometimes steals her jobs, about Anna Winter calling Agyness a fashion icon while she was wearing that awful quilted Chanel anklet around her arm on a dare. He listens and he listens and sometimes, when they ask he maybe tells them things about his day, his week. He talks about Marc stealing most of his dinner, Steve tripping over the wires and fucking up his knee, about the driver who got Albert lost on the way to a radio interview and by mistake took him to the wrong stations, about Albert giving an interview at said station without knowing he was meant to be at another one across the city and the freshman college radio host who was so excited to have him there and, and Spencer tells the same stories over and over again.

They both let him.

They both let him.

He… he just doesn’t know anymore.

At the end of the month Ryan decides to leave. The tour manager, Rich, drives him to the airport. Spencer hugs him at the check point. Ryan is the one that breaks it. It’s strange. Suddenly, Spencer realises that the longest he and Ryan have ever been apart were the months before George Ross died.

“Bye Spence.” Ryan tells him. “See you soon.”

“Yeah.”

Then Ryan is gone.

He doesn’t look back.

Spencer doesn’t either.

(He’s back at the venue within an hour.

He doesn’t miss a beat at the sound check).

 

 

A week later Gemma flies out from Prague.

He doesn’t know what she was doing there – a cover, an editorial, a show, an interview, it could have been anything – and she doesn’t tell him. Instead she wraps her arms around his neck and holds him and doesn’t let go, not even when he tries to pull away. She smells of perfume and caster sugar. The fabric of her dress crinkled under his fingers. He is probably creasing it.

“Shhh…” she whispers. “Shhh…”

He doesn’t know why she’s saying that.

Kissing the fragile skin under his ear, she pulls away slightly. He had never seen her eyes so bright. For a moment, a forgettable and forgivable moment that he doesn’t know if he can ever understand, she blinks rapidly as if she is about to cry.

“I wish I could take you home with me,” she tells him so quietly he isn’t sure he heard her.

His breath does something stupid. Something a child’s would do.

He doesn’t say he wishes that too. He doesn’t. He doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t. He wants too. He does so very, very much. So much he can’t look at her. Can’t focus on her or anything else. The fabric of her dress had to be wrinkled by now. By how tight he was holding her.

She touches his brow and swipes her thumbs over his cheekbones.

“I wish I could take you home with me,” she says again. “I really wish I could.”

He lets out a shaky laugh. She holds him tighter.

Later, at the venue they sit together out in the late morning sunshine. In the light she looks golden and he thinks maybe, just maybe of things he could have. He wants to talk to her. To tell her something; something that they both can have and keep. He doesn’t have the words though. So they read someone else’s aloud instead.

“Close your eyes,” she tells him. “What do you see?”

“Black,” he recites.

“Look harder.”

Gemma bits her lip, and tries the line again.

Spencer touches the cracked spine of the script and watches. Her inflection alters. The expression on her face is muted, still needing to be refined into something else. Someone else named Jackie. He looks at his next line. Across the parking lot Steve is smoking with some of the sound guys. Albert is on his mobile; even at a distance his eyes look soft. Agyness must be on the other end of the line.

Spencer could be anywhere in the world.

 

 

In the space between shows and stops, the engine of the bus rumbles and roars as they travel. The kitchenette table vibrates ever so slightly under Spencer's fingertips. He feels like if he isn’t careful, if he doesn’t keep himself in check, he could think that he was anywhere in the world. State lines don’t mean anything. Not really. Not anymore. Nor do country or continental ones. Just another stamp and another hundred gallons of gas.

He closes his eyes.

He closes his eyes and when he opens them Albert is sitting across from him. 

“Hey Ulysses.”

Spencer blinks a little. Albert looks a little worn. His curly dark hair is tangled and knotted, and his fingers stained with ink. From what Spencer can tell, Albert looks like he is around halfway through the sodoku book Agyness had sent him. The pages are yellowed and dog eared. According to the sticker on the front, she bought it for a penny. Spencer does not know where. When Albert puts it aside, for a second, Spencer catches sight of faded the inscription on the front page. Someone named Georgiana had given it to a Thomas with love and affection in ’78. Obviously it hadn’t been an appreciated gift the first time around.

“You look tired,” Albert tells him.

“I sleep too much already.”

Albert looks at him, his eyes so steady, so calm and Spencer feels his shoulders give up their façade and slump a little. The windows of the bus are dark. A few metres away from the two of them, Marc mumbles something in his sleep; about his girl, or a girl. None of the others wake. Marc settles again. Spencer feels a little restless. Like something without his permission is building up under his skin.

“Has your band broken up?”

Albert’s expression alters. He does not ask which one or offer a practiced reply. “No.”

Spencer looks out the bus windows. He can’t see anything. Not really. Not with the kitchen lights on.

“We really are just taking a break.” Albert says finally.

Spencer shrugs. He had met them all - Julian Casablancas, Nikolai Fraiture, Fabrizio Moretti, even Nick Valensi – when they played in New York. Albert had introduced him to all of them one by one. Only Nick hadn’t made it to a show. Instead Spencer and all the others had crowded into his apartment and tried their very best to be quiet, oh so quiet because his girlfriend had just given birth to twins. Spencer remembers heading off into the night to meet Gemma and some of her friends for dinner. He remembers Marc following him, Steve and Josh too. And he remembers how Julian – _‘Call me Jules_ ’ – had cordoned Albert off and away from the others; his eyes dark and his voice lowered so no one else would overhear.

When Albert was thirteen he was in Switzerland with Julian, at some boarding school.

When Spencer was thirteen he was in suburban Las Vegas planning his escape with Ryan. 

“Spencer,” Albert begins, his voice gentle, his voice brining him back. “There’s no rush. Sometimes you need time.”

Spencer looks at him. He wants to know how Albert can think that.

“It’ll be okay, Spence,” Albert says. “In the end.”

Albert smiles a little, and Spencer feels young again.

Their conversation lapses into silence.

 

 

Spencer falls asleep at – well, he doesn’t know where but somewhere in Europe, maybe Berlin, maybe Vienna – and when he wakes he finds a cup of cold coffee in his hands and five Euro’s in the coffee.

Steve and Matt snicker from across the bus.

Spencer snorts and closes his eyes once more.

 

 

While in Amsterdam, Spencer goes to visit The Academy is... A Few days earlier, Jon Walker called to alert him to the fact they’d be in the same city at the same time.

“Come on Spence,” he cajoled in that tone of his. “I’ll even get you backstage tickets.”

“I could get those without your help,” Spencer retorted, eyes focused on the white dashes flicking past his eyes as the tour bus drove steadily onwards towards the next venue.

“You could,” Jon conceded. “But we couldn’t get tickets to see Albert Hammond Jr.”

Spencer didn’t know if that was true or not, but as the white dashes turned into lines, then into double lines he couldn’t remember which side of the road they were driving on and he couldn’t remember when he last did. Jon made a sound. It sounded like he was exhaling smoke. Spencer imagined him for a moment.

Then he made a sound.

Jon took it as one of agreement.

At the time Spencer doesn’t say or do anything to convince him otherwise. He put Jon and the others on the guest list the next day though and as he is waved into the seedy looking pub a few days later, he assumes Jon must have done the same for not only him, but for Albert and the others too. Or maybe the bouncer recognizes them and realised what publicity they could provide the event. Either way he was in, and so were they.

“I’m getting a drink,” Josh shouts over the music, pushing his messy dark hair away from his eyes. “Want one?”

Spencer nods.

Backstage was the same as every other backstage. He finds himself a chair and a beer and nods at all the people he doesn’t really remember but should. He toured with The Academy Is… he got drunk and high with them. Or Ryan and Brendon did. Brent too. Maybe. Spencer isn’t sure.

The kids in the opening band look really fucking young, like teenagers or something. They’re talking about Albert. Their voices are all hushed excitement. Like they think they should be too cool by now to be excited that Albert _Fucking_ Hammond Jr. From The _Fucking_ Strokes is here tonight, and is going to watch them play. Fuck. Hell. Their faces are red and Spencer can’t stop watching them.

“I don’t even know what they’re called,” Jon states when he returns, and, “You got a drink.”

“It’s Europe,” Spencer replies.

It’s not clever or witty. Just fact. He feels tired all of a sudden.

“So…”

Jon smiles and it’s kind of wonderful. “You’re kinda epically cool Spencer Smith. Everyone’s talking about you.”

Spencer takes another slip of his drink.

Jon kicks back and takes a sip of his own drink. “Albert Hammond Jr. is out there and so is his band.”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t think they’d come.”

“They did.”

“Yeah.”

Spencer nods.

“How much longer until the other dude gets back?”

Spencer shrugs.

He doesn’t really know.

Matt sounded pretty fucked up when he’d last called. Another delay. _'Rehab is fucking hard,'_ he’d said, _'And the nurses aren’t nearly as hot as I imagined they’d be.'_ Albert tentatively said another month. Maybe month and a half. Spencer isn’t bothered either way. He has no where else to be.

“Spence–”

Spencer knows that tone. It makes his back bristle and the tone he uses when he speak is sharper than it should be. “Don’t.”

“Spencer, they’re worried. We all thought you’d be back by now. You’ve been gone so long.”

Spencer looks away. He looks away even though he shouldn’t. Jon’s his friend. They spent the better part of the Truckstops and Statelines Winter Tour together. He’d filled in for Brent. They had asked him to. They like him. They all like him. Spencer shouldn’t act like he’s acting. He shouldn’t.

“Spence–”

“What happened to Tom?”

Jon expression shifts. “Nothing that wasn’t a long time coming.”

Spencer looks away.

Bill is making a fucking fool of himself in front of the opening act. All too long limbs and his fucking too pretty smile. Spencer thinks that the someday someone will get hurt because of him has come and gone too many times over already. He looks and then looks away. Looks at Jon instead. Jon who’s still here. Still tuning guitars and basses and running errands and getting drunk with his friends who are all in bands while he still isn’t.

“You heading home soon?” he asks.

Jon puts his beer aside. “No.”

Spencer thinks Jon should have lied. He doesn’t tell him that. Instead he says he better get back to Albert and the guys and invites Jon along.

Jon comes.

Spencer isn’t sure if he’s glad that he does, or if he isn’t.

But that’s not really new, there are a lot of things he isn’t sure of.

 

 

Outside a city of no particular name or importance, the buses all stop one by one to refuel and everyone tumbles out of them. Legs in need of stretching and energy in want of burning leads to guys fucking around in the grass beside the road, while others fill the gas station store. Junk food and cigarettes get restocked, the communal band magazines of choice get bought or just flipped though but Spencer stays on the bus. Still half asleep he looks out the bus window and idly stirs what’s left of the cereal supplies in a bowl that must be dirty while chewing a mouthful of soggy corn flakes.

Albert slips back onto the bus and sits himself next to Spencer. Spencer pushes his bowl towards him. Albert smiles and pushes it back. He takes a plastic sweets packet out of his jacket pocket. Spencer doesn’t recognize the brand by sight, but it looks like it is chocolate. He takes one when Albert holds the packet out.

“Thanks.”

Albert nods.

Together they watch everyone else. By the pumps Josh is flirting with a girl and her mother. Steve and Gus, the cool sound guy who always holds the best hotel parties, laugh lazily. Rich slaps the back of their heads one by one when he walks by. Marc tripped on the step outside the bathrooms; his cheeks flooded with colour. Steve laughs. Marc punches him. Josh joined in. They rolled around a little until one of the people from the label – a pretty girl named Frida – yells at them to stop.

Catching Albert’s smiling eyes, Spencer laughs a little.

He laughs too, and when Steve and Marc returned to the bus smirking and showing off their grass stained elbows and bloody noses they both laughed a little more.

The tour is made up of moments like that. Of Josh telling the same stupid stories and gossipping about the million and one bands he and the others have all been in. Of shows that sometimes go badly and sometimes don’t. Of stolen time Spencer spends with Gemma in between gigs and shoots. It’s all these small little pieces and days that don’t feel like they mean anything at all until he looks back on them.

And Albert. The tour is made up of him.

“Did you ever think, just maybe, it could last?” Albert asks, and for once he looks interested instead of effortless.

Spencer doesn’t know what to say. Okay. No. That’s a lie. He does. He could say ‘ _yes._ ’ Yes, he had thought they would last and be doing their thing well into middle age a la The Rolling Stones. He did. Really. Brendon would be just as skinny at sixty as he had been at sixteen and Ryan more pretentious and Brent… Brent.

No words come out.

“That’s the problem with youth,” Albert mumbles, turning away a little to light his cigarette. “The kids stay the same age while you get old and fuck, Smith, maybe you guys need to think about growing old with each other and not being lost boys together.”

“I’m only twenty.”

Albert laughs, smoke billows from his mouth in stop starts. “Try saying it with a little enthusiasm kid. And stop wishing for the garage days.”

“I’m not.”

“Good,” he breathed, looking at Spencer from underneath dark lashes. “Because they sucked. Really. I mean, what’s music if you can’t play it loud and whenever the fuck you want?”

Albert smiles then and lights another cigarette and offers it to Spencer.

Spencer takes it and inhales it all almost in one breath.

“That’s better,” Albert mumbles. “Now I’m not the only one ruining my voice.”

Spencer wants to laugh. “I’m not a singer.”

Albert quirks one brow. “Really Spencer Ulysses Smith? Really? Then what are you, if not that?”

“A drummer.”

Albert smiles and blows out three smoke rings in quick succession. "Multiple personalities. I knew there was a reason everyone liked you so much Spencer Ulysses Smith.”

 

 

Two weeks later, Matt calls from outside New York City Memorial Hospital.

“Clean fucking bill of health!” he announces on speaker phone. “Finally!”

The guys laugh and cheer and Josh makes a foul joke.

Albert places his hand on Spencer’s knee.

 

 

By the end of the week Matt is back and on his first night and Spencer’s last, practically everyone on the tour tumbles out of their buses and vans towards the nearest bar. Walking side by side in the dark by Albert, Spencer blows warm air into his hands and tries not to think.

“What are you going to do now?” Albert asks, his voice almost lost as the wind battered them from all directions.

Spencer bites his lip and shrugs.

Albert shook his head. “You need to find a better not-answer than that Ulysses.”

“Yeah. Probably.”

Up in front of them, Marc awkwardly laughs and then swears when the flame he is using to light up his cigarette blows out. Josh rolls his eyes and takes the lighter from him. Marc grins and brings his hands up around the cancer stick. ‘ _Fucking cheapskate’_ Spencer vaguely hears one of them (maybe Marc, maybe Josh) curses under his breath as Josh flicks it on and lights it for Marc.

Warmth floods over them when they finally reached the pub. Sound follows as they settles inside it.

“You should go see Agyness,” Albert suggests.

Matt snorts, mouth curled into something Spencer isn’t quite familiar with. “You’d really send the boy home to baby-sit your girl?” 

Albert blows smoke into Matt’s face and narrows his eyes. “Yes.”

He does not elaborate. But he holds the drummers gaze.

Matt holds up his hands in surrender. “Don’t kill the messenger.”

“I can do whatever I like. You’re my gimpy drummer, not a messenger.”

Matt laughs, loud and careless. Spencer does not know him. Not like he knows the others. But he thinks it could mean nothing at all. He turns his head and watches Marc and Josh get themselves distracted by girls’ and said girls’ come hither eyes.

Sometimes it feels the same.

Bad jokes, worse dance moves, hotel room parties and boredom, a blur of girl’s faces and tour dates. He could be on nearly any tour, or with any other bands. Instead of the girl from the pages of Nylon by Steve’s side, it could have been Audrey by Brendon’s, or Keltie by Ryan’s. Everything feels interchangeable and fluid.

Later, back on the bus and heading not towards another gig, but the airport Steve pulls out his crappy acoustic guitar and makes them all sing drunkenly along to bad songs from the 1990s and when he spins out an equally crappy solo to match his crappy guitar they all laugh, including Spencer.

 

 

_**Part three: Post Tour/London.** _

 

 

Once more Spencer is left at one airport and picked up at another. At Geneva’s Airport – Spencer doesn’t remember its official name – he’d waves to the guys and says his goodbyes and means it when he promises to keep in touch. Between check – in desks Albert hands over a ticket to London and wraps his arms tight around Spencer and doesn’t let go until Spencer does.

“Go to London,” he says, smiling that smile of his again, pushing a ticket into Spencer’s hand.

And Spencer does.

He can’t think of a good enough reason to not.

And once he knows that, it isn’t too bad, not really. He calls Gemma in the waiting lounge. She sounds like sunshine and cotton sheets. She says she’s at home. He’s never exactly sure where ‘home’ is when it comes to Gemma. Sometimes it’s New York. Sometimes it’s Sydney. Sometimes she doesn’t say the word at all. But she sounds happy. Soft and sweet and he curls up and listens to her talk about her day until his flight is called to board the plane.

“I miss you,” he tells her at the end of the call.

He imagines her smiling; all jade green eyes and sunshine.

“I miss you too,” she replies. “And I’ll see you soon. I promise.”

“Pinky promise?”

“Yeah,” she breathes.

He sleeps through the flight. When he arrives he takes a taxi from the airport to Agyness’ and relies more on the cabbies knowledge of London than the directions she’d sent him. Days of getting lost in arena hallways, losing themselves in Church Opportunity shops combined with the little stick figure drawings of Spencer and Agyness tap dancing interrupting the haphazard instructions is more enough of a incentive to trust a bored looking cab driver than her.

Upon arrival at her door, she greets with a hug and a kiss on the cheek and the offer to let him buy her breakfast.

“I know a wonderful place,” she tells him.

“I think I’d really rather sleep.”

Her eyes dim.

She steps back. “Yeah. That’s cool. Jet lag. Tomorrow maybe.”

She smiles again and runs a hand through her short hair. Turning, she drops her clutch on a side table and shows him up the long hall to his room. Her heels click and clack on the wooden floorboards as she guides him through her Primrose Hill townhouse. Somewhere between the kitchen and the unused dinning room, she takes his hand in hers and holds on to it tight and doesn’t let go.

Spencer has never been all that good by himself. Or deciding things by himself. Ryan does that. Usually. Sometimes Brendon. But neither of them were here. Neither of them know he is here either. There’s only Agyness and at least two wardrobes full of flea market clothes. There’s also a studio. Like a recording studio. Sort of. And although it’s filled with a variety of instruments, Spencer doesn’t recognise half, and the half he does recognise don’t merely look retro, but antique.

“Albert likes to collect things,” Agyness explains as she finishes the tour in the studio.

Spencer looks at her.

She looks right back at him. "He said you could touch them. Or play them. Whatever.”

He looks at them.

She looks at them too.

They hold hands for a little bit longer. Until they don’t. Spencer shoves both into his jean pockets and she crosses her arms and they walk back out of the studio and into the house. The weather is already turning. Well, it could be. Spencer has leapfrogged through too many seasons and time zones to know for sure. It feels cold though. Sharp. His throat hurts a little later when he tries to get some sleep.

The house creaks around him.

He still clearly remembers being five years old. He doesn’t know if he should.

 

 

On the fourth day Spencer calls Ryan.

“What are you doing Spence?” Ryan whispers, his voice almost lost amidst the static.

Spencer doesn’t have an answer.

“When are you coming home?”

Spencer doesn’t have an answer to that question either.

He half wants to hang up. But he doesn’t because it’s Ryan and Spencer loves him more than anyone else in the entire world.

Ryan says other things. Spencer doesn't. He presses his free hand against his temple and when Ryan hangs up, Spencer goes back inside and puts his phone back on charge. The house is too large and too quiet. His clothes are dirty and his hair are getting a little long. The phone rings seven times. Or eight. Spencer isn’t sure. The connection is bad. Maybe he should have asked to use the landline.

Agyness is working today. A shoot. Or something. She’d left before dawn. There is a note, Spencer thinks. In the kitchen. Or in the hall. He can’t remember where exactly. But there is one.

He doesn’t know what to do with himself.

 

 

Agyness Deyn is annoying and pretty god damn gorgeous. She’s also the love of Albert Hammond Jr.'s life, so all things considered she makes for pretty good company even at the worst of times. Spencer doesn’t think she knows what to do with herself either. So for the first few weeks, when she isn't working, they mostly oversleep and watch bad reality TV together. Boredom becomes a group activity.

“Want to see some pictures of Drew Barrymore in her underwear?” she offers while they are watching mindless reality tv shows together.

Spencer looks at her.

Agyness blinks. “Fabrizio sent everyone copies.”

Spencer opens his mouth, but then closed it. He has no idea what to say to such an offer.

Agyness rolls her eyes at him.

They go back to watching _America’s Next Top Model._

 

 

Slowly, somehow, Spencer becomes used to living with Agyness.

Mostly.

Agyness is like, Spencer doesn’t know. Maybe a cat or something? Either way she’s always appearing out of nowhere and once she’s there, she’s always under foot.

In the morning Spencer wakes early. Around him the house is quiet – so quiet he thinks he has it all to himself. He makes himself breakfast and reads the newspaper and is finishing brushing his teeth in the bathroom when she materializes almost out of thin air.

“You know, we kinda look alike,” she tells him, resting her chin on his shoulder.

Spencer resolutely continues brushing his teeth.

She narrows her eyes.

“I kinda look like a boy and you kinda look like a girl,” she explains, as if she has given the matter a whole lot of thought and that was the undeniable conclusion she had reached.

“I don’t look like a girl,” Spencer says, because it has to be said and out of the two of them it looks like he is the only one who will say it.

Agyness rolls her eyes. “You sort of do.”

He narrows his eyes.

She kisses his cheek.

“It’s okay. Promise,” she mollifies. “It’s part of the reason people like us as much as they do.”

She gets a little distracted after that; running a comb through her short hair and fiddling around with various tubes and pots of moisturisers and make up. Spencer snorts. She takes the opportunity to steal his toothbrush and put it into her mouth.

“That’s disgusting,” he tells her.

She smirks. “I know you are but what am I?”

He makes a face at her. She makes one right back at him. “Don’t be a whiner Spencer Ulysses Smith.”

“I don’t look like a girl.”

She eyes him. “You so do.”

He refuses to look at her then.

“You know, growing a beard won’t change that.”

 

 

For some reason they keep ending up in the studio.

Or he keeps ending up in the studio. She just follows.

“You sing?” she asks, as they sit in the recording booth doing nothing really because the band is something he doesn’t want to think about and she’s a model and as such has the most unpredictable and random schedule he had ever seen.

“Back-up vocals sometimes.”

She stretches a little. “Maybe you could let someone else do that for a while?”

He snorts. “You?”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m already too much of a cliché to do that.”

He wants to laugh. He barely manages to hold it in.

They keep doing nothing.

A few hours later morning arrives.

They decide to leave and make breakfast.

 

 

Nothing much changes. Some more times passes and they both keep doing things that fill some time but not enough. Boredom overtakes him. Without the tour or a tour – Panic’s or Albert’s – Spencer finds himself with too much time. Too much idle time. Agyness has a ‘schedule’ though, well, for this week.

“Something for Henry,” she explains the night before when her agent calls to finalise the details for her upcomming Henry Holland shoot. “We’ve been friends, for like, forever.”

He doesn’t know why, but sometimes when she speaks like that he wonders why.

She chipped a piece of black nail polish off her index finger.

“Want to tag along?”

He shrugs.

She drifted off to find some nail polish remover.

 

 

Somehow he gets pulled into one of her modelling gigs.

“He’s so pretty,” she tells Henry Holland while getting made up. “It’s almost unfair how pretty he is.”

And Henry hums. “Yes.”

Agyness lets out a sound of disappointment. “Far too beautiful for a boy.”

Henry nods in agreement. “Yes.”

Agyness makes another sound, this time more of a gasp than a sigh. “You should use him too. We’ve got exactly the same colour eyes.”

Henry pauses.

Then…

“His are prettier. So are his collarbones.”

And Spencer finds himself eyed by more than one set of eyes. All of them looking far too intensely and for far too long. Agyness turns to look at him too. Her blueblueblue eyes half made up and her hair mussed around her head in a way that might be deliberate but really just looks messy to Spencer’s eyes.

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

Spencer glares at her.

She smiles back.

“Plus,” she states, turning to the photographer. “He’s a rock star. A real one.”

The photographer tentatively shuffles forward. “It would add symmetry to the concept.”

And that there was where Spencer says ‘ _No_.’ He also said ‘ _No_ ,’ when Henry and one of the stylists went rustling through the racks of T-Shirts and appeared with a bejeweled thing. He said ‘No,’ when the make – up and hair girl moved from Agyness to him and the guy doing hair followed. Then he said it again when Agyness grabbed his hand and shoved him in front of the lens and told him to let her do all the work, ' _Hell no_.'

“We’re going to make each other look so cool,” she hums happily.

“I hate you.”

“No you don’t. You love me. I got you five thousand euros for one day’s work. You should buy me dinner. And, like, a car.”

“I’m not buying you anything, you filthy friend selling sell out.”

“To my ears that sounds like you just invited the whole crew.”

Spencer glares.

The camera snaps.

Agyness pinches him between shots.

“You’re doing great,” she stage whispers in front of everyone.

He thinks he might hate her.

A week later he decides he does, really, like completely. For at the end of the week Agyness and Henry got the final prints to proof and suddenly Pete was texting him stupid insulting text messages and Gabe Fucking Saporta had sent him far too many pictures of him and Victoria curled around each other in neon t-shirts for Spencer to stand.

Gemma thinkst it is cute.

“You got your big break,” she laughs over the phone line from somewhere in Asia.

“Yeah, yeah,” Spencer mumbles, blushing horribly.

“You’ll have to sign the copies Agyness sent me. Please make them out to your ‘Biggest fan.’ That way I’ll make more when I put them up on eBay.”

“Clever.”

“Agyness thought so too.”

Gemma giggles again, and Spencer imagines her smile. Tapping his fingers against the counter, he feels something warm and whole pressed up against his rib cage.

 

 

Spencer remembers being on tour; not with Albert, but with his own band. He doesn’t remember which date or even which tour exactly but somewhere and some point… Spencer doesn’t know exactly. He remembers not caring. He remembers that and he remembers Ryan’s bony fingers gripping his jaw tightly as he drew designs and coloured in Spencer’s face.

“There. Finished,” Ryan said, Spencer remembers that.

There.

Finished.

And then Ryan had glanced over his shoulder at Brent and Brendon. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was Spencer who looked. Not really caring, but looking anyway just so he wouldn’t have to look at Ryan.

Ryan glanced over his shoulder and then, he turned and pressed his lips against Spencer’s.

Fleetingly, just for a moment. Then he used his fingers – bony fingers – to smooth the cherry red lip gloss, his cherry red lip gloss, across Spencer’s lips.

“There,” he had said. “Finished.”

 

 

When Spencer finally finishes unpacking he finds three drum sticks at the bottom of his case. One is broken, but the others are still good. He doesn’t remember where they’re from or where he got them. They fit in his hands though and that day when he goes down to the studio he walks into the recording booth and sits behind Albert’s drum kit.

He sits there for a while and after lunch he sits there a little more.

He plays a little before dinner time.

It feels a little like it did at the very beginning.

Only not really.

Spencer isn’t the talented one. Not really. That’s always been Ryan and Brendon. He’s always just been a background boy. A clog in the machine; not terribly important but not all together useless either. He had a place within the scheme of things and in the scheme of things he was needed in it.

He starts with the beat.

It’s simple first. He needs a backbone, and the drums have always been that to him. Percussion in the more general sense – the anchors of cymbals, xylophones, and glockenspiels and whatever the hell else Albert had managed to accumulate – come next. They are the skeleton to it all, but more importantly they are familiar. He can touch them and play them and make some kind of noise and breathe because it’s easy and it doesn’t hurt.

Other things are harder.

His voice is weak. It fades in and out. Sometimes Agyness looks at him and once in a while she steps into the sound booth and sings with him. Her voice isn’t anything to remember either. More often than not, it is a pitch off. Flat to Spencer’s sharp. Maybe it’s a little sad. Maybe it’s more than that when he thinks about it. But Agyness just smiles that smile of hers which looks more like a wink than a smile, and after he stops recording she takes him out.

Everyone who is anyone knows her and every place in London lets her in.

And Spencer too.

Together they sit in VIP booths and circle around in VIP circles. Pretty socialite girls with names of fruits not girls’, and eyes that look eternally dazed by years of flash photography and hipster boys with backgrounds of shinned knees or silver spoons rotate around them. They don’t really look at either Spencer or Agyness when they speak, but they do somehow find things to say that fill in the moments between drinks and the lulls in already too loud songs. He doesn’t know why Agyness bothers with them.

“They’re exactly like me,” she tells him at some club where the lights are low and the people all look like they have names Spencer should know.

He thinks she’s a liar.

She smiles at him, like he should know this by now. Behind them, a girl – ' _My dearest of dear friends Alexa Chung,'_ Agyness introduced her as three nights ago or maybe just three clubs ago – laughes at something her boyfriend Alex Tuner said and Agyness laughs too even though the music swallowed the joke before it had had a chance to reach them.

Spencer makes himself laugh too.

Alex catches his eye and Spencer decides to let him keep it. Agyness and Alexa continue their conversation and somehow Alex and Spencer start a new one all their own underneath all the lights and drowning in noise and warm drinks. For almost an hour they talk about music and at the end of it when Alexa – Agyness’ dearest of dear friends – reels him back in, Spencer remembers they’d never meet before despite playing at the same Carling Weekend festival. When the Artic Monkeys had been playing in Readings, Panic! At the Disco had been playing in Leeds, and the other two days of the festival had them at alternative sites at different times. But still, Alex talked to him as if it hadn’t been like that at all.

It’s a bit of a lie too, but Spencer doesn’t think he minds.

 

 

Afterwards, after Alexa and Alex have shifted their conversations to include others, Spencer and Agyness stand together and the club gets fuller and fuller no matter how many faces leave. He feels tried now. He doesn’t know why no one else looks like they are too. The drink in his hand is still full. He doesn’t know why he bought it. Agyness sighs.

“There’s never any good music for me to dance to.”

“That’s why Franz Ferdinand is so popular,” he replies because he doesn’t know what else to say.

She laughs.

Agyness knows everyone, and everyone that’s anyone here seems to know her too so it’s very probable she knows each and every band member. Spencer should probably watch his mouth. Probably. But he’s done that before and maybe he’s good at that, however that’s never amounted to anything so he doesn’t try to.

Spencer thinks deep down the whole production of walking the red carpet and standing in the VIP section at clubs and bars and being the honoured guest at the launch of the newest Chanel store bores her terribly. Watching her decked out in designer labels she doesn’t really like, to wear playing the couturier mascot instead of this girl that buys puzzles with missing pieces at Op Shops and ping pong tables to surprise her fiancé and his band makes him feel hollow.

He thinks they both want to leave.

They don’t though.

 

 

He begins to live in the studio for days at a time. He lives there and he plays around with Albert’s collection of instruments and learns Agyness used to be in a band. She tells him it wasn’t much. Just something to do. Something between almost-but-not-quite friends. Something to fill in the hours between jobs. He’d believe her if her tone wasn’t coloured with so many defensively flippant ‘totally’s’ and ‘like’s.’

“I told you I was a cliché.”

He plucks at a viola sting. The note is clear and rich; it fills the air. It reminds him of Maryland. Of Brendon. Spencer puts the instrument aside. It gleams a little in the soft light.

“Want to go to Berlin with me?” Agyness offers more than she asks. “Gemma and I are doing an editorial thing for Vogue.”

Instantly Spencer’s mind fills with images of Gemma.

She had won the role in _The Black Balloon_ he helped her prepare for all those months ago. Filming is due to start in Australia within the next few weeks. Gemma is going home early to help do her share of pre-production work. Spencer has never seen her so excited about a project before. It is exactly what she wants. But he will miss her. Though the film’s budget and thus shotting schedule was tight, he won’t see her for months.

He breathes a yes.

It’s only when he gets there, when he takes that first step into the villa she and Agyness are shooting in,  he is able to think and rest and be sane again. It’s sort of more than that when Gemma spots him and her face breaks into a smile. She’s made up and not really looking like anything Spencer can understand, but she’s still Gemma and he risks the ire of the photographer, editor and various make up people when he gently kisses her hello.

“Surprise,” he mumbled against her lips.

Foundly, she tugs on the ends of his hair.

It feels like home.

The next few hours become a blur until the shoot stops.

Afterwards Agyness and Gemma take him out. Like how it is for Agyness in London, she and Gemma know Berlin and the whole city seems to know them. They wine him and dine him and then the next day he watches them work and somehow he manages to get invited to a Red Cross charity dinner with them. A musician he has never heard of before is performing. According to the program his name is Jens Lekman and when he is on stage singing and playing his songs about his girlfriend cutting off his finger and his friends not thinking he’s any fun and using his one phone call at jail to request a song on the radio, well, he looks like an angel. Afterwards Gemma introduces Spencer to him.

“So, Gem tells me you’re a musician,” Jens says in his melodic voice, eyes still alight.

“Sort of.”

Jens laughs and Spencer blushes.

“I’m mostly a fuck up.”

Jens puts his guitar aside and leans in close. “Me too. Don’t tell anyone though.”

He backs away as quickly as he had leant in and before Spencer can say anything more, he starts playing another song. This time about his hairdresser and it shouldn’t be meaningful and it shouldn’t be touching but it is.

They don’t get another chance to talk that night.

Later on the cab ride back to the airport, Spencer thinks about calling someone to tell them about Jens. He looks down at his contact list and looks through all the singers and drummers and musicians and producers and vaguely related people and switches his phone off. He doesn’t think any of the people he knows would understand.

By his side, Gemma closes her eyes and before they reach the entrance of the freeway she’s asleep against his side. Her breathing steady and even against the crock of his neck, her body warm and lovely. He holds her tight and watches her sleep.

When they arrive at the airport he kisses her goodbye and his heart aches when she boards the plane to Australia.

 

 

By the end of that week he finishes something. A song maybe. A mess probably. Or nothing. Most likely nothing. Agyness and he decided to celebrate the occasion by getting drunk and high. Bouncing on to his bed, she fits herself next to him and grins.

“I shouldn’t smoke that,” he tells her as she hands him a joint. “It’ll ruin my voice.”

She looks at him.

He looks right back at her. “That’s what I’m told anyway.”

Her lips quirk.

“I shouldn’t drink,” she tells him, right to his face. “Alcohol makes you fat and no one hires fat models.”

They look at each other again and they start doing just that because it’s one of the better ideas considering how they both miss Albert and how he isn’t there to smile that enigmatic smile and look down at them like they’re the most interesting things in the entire world.

Agyness is a fun drunk.

Spencer isn’t so much. He zones out around twenty minutes into the fun and when he wakes Agyness is giggling and then he’s giggling and she’s got his mobile and hey – when did that happen? His reactions are slow, and he can’t really be bothered using them so his mobile stays in her hands.

“You chose your birthday as your password?” she mocks, “Dude, that’s so easy.”

He thinks he mutters, ‘ _No, you are,_ ’ or he would have, had she not been flicking down his contact list.

“I want to call Ashlee Simpson,” she announces. “I’ve decided she’s going to be my best friend.”

“I thought I was your best friend,” Spencer complains, absent minded and distracted.

“Nope. I want her. You’ve already got one number one best friend, and a number two best friend and I refuse to be your third. No. I need a number one best friend friendship/relationship. I deserve it.”

“And you think Ashlee Simpson will give you that?”

Agyness eyes him. “Why wouldn’t she?”

Spencer shrugs. He doesn’t have an answer for that. He lets her call Pete and find out the answer for herself. The phone rings four times before Pete picks it up. Agyness giggles the whole time and Spencer does too when he realises she’s wearing mostly his clothes and they’re a little tight on her.

“That’s the reason I can never be with you,” she tells him. “I never date boys who are skinnier than me. It’s bad for my morale.”

Meanwhile Pete is saying ‘ _Hello?_ ’ and _‘Spence Wentz , are you there?’_ but Agyness’s eyes are too pretty and he kisses her once just because he can and once more just because he wants too. She tastes of Jack Daniels and whiskey, with a little bit of a flea market aftertaste. That makes Spencer start to giggle again. Agyness shushes him with one hand.

“Hello,” she says in a very proper English voice. “My name is Agyness Deyn and I wish to speak to Ashlee.”

“Where the fuck is Spencer?”

Agyness, as she is English and engaged to Albert Hammond Jr. and very used to getting her way, sniffs. “He is sitting next to me.”

She somehow manages to put the mobile on speaker phone and Spencer mumbles something, maybe a hello.

“Spencer, what the fuck?”

Spencer giggles.

Agyness puts her hand over his mouth to shut him up.

Spencer licks it.

“Ew! That’s gross.”

“No you are!” he retorts, feeling very clever.

“Am not!”

“Are too!”

Spencer giggles.

Something in the room makes a sound.

It sounds like Sufjan Stevens.

“I hear voices.”

Agyness’s eyes widen. “Me too.”

Spencer glances around and – “Hey, it’s your mobile.”

He answers it. 

“Agyness James Deyn’s mobile.”

“Spencer?” Albert asks, amused.

“Hey Albert. How’s it hanging?”

“Good, good. Is Agyness there?”

At her name, Agyness perks up. “Is that Albert?”

“Yes.”

“Does he want to speak to me?”

Spencer narrows his eyes. “I’m not sure. Let me ask.”

He put the phone back to his ear.

“Do you want to speak to Agyness?”

“What the fuck Spencer?” Pete swears, with maybe a touch of confused laughter.

But Spencer doesn’t get the chance to hear that as Agyness snatches the mobile from his hands.

“Albert, Albert. I miss you,” she announces. “I love you so, so much and my heart. My heart it aches for you.”

Spencer closes his eyes, just for a second. When he opes them he hears voices. He looks for Agyness. Then at her once he sees her. Or the right her (there are three). She put her index finger on his lips.

“Shhhh,” she whispered, falling on top of his chest. “Albert and Peter are conference calling.”

Spencer felt a giggle building up inside him.

“We have to be serious Spencer Ulysses Smith. Mature. Adult even.”

Spencer felt those giggles build up more and more.

Agyness makes a serious face.

Spencer can’t hold it in anymore.

 

 

Albert returns home for a long weekend. Most of it he spends with Agyness. Sometimes Spencer tags along when they go out to bars or clubs or wherever the night takes them. Somehow, despite her hectic schedule Gemma manages to make time to be in London too, and together she and Spencer hold hands under the strobe lights. It feels like someone to come home to. Then, when the morning breaks on the last day, Albert stumbles out to the recording studio and sits himself down.

“Show me what you have.”

Spencer’s hands shake a little. But not really because he’s a guy and guy’s hands don’t shake. They sweat or something. He doesn’t know. Albert sighs and smiles. For a moment he looks like Agyness, which somehow makes sense in foresight given what he says next.

“Agy say’s you’re making something. Music maybe.”

“She’s a bad secret keeper.”

Albert rolls his eyes. “She’s also a bad singer, so show me what you’ve got and then I’ll call someone over to re-do her part.”

There is no way Spencer can say no to that. But he somehow does, when Albert tries to convince him to let someone else do Agyness’s part.

“I like her voice,” he says, but really he means he likes her.

Albert understands what he means without having to try and when the weekend finishes, Spencer, the stuff he’s been making (' _Music,_ ' Albert would mumble in that way of his) sounds a little different. A little better maybe? Spencer isn’t sure. But more solid. Less fractured.

When Albert leaves, takes a copy of what Spencer’s made so far.

A week later Spencer sends him something that could be another song.

A week after that he sends another.

Albert tells him to keep going.

Spencer does.

 

 

Brendon appears one day.

Standing on Agyness’s doorstep, dressed in that red parka of his, he somehow looks smaller and skinnier and more beautiful than Spencer remembered. He also presses his body against Spencer’s and climbs into his bed.

His mouth is full, and when he presses it against Spencer’s, Spencer can’t really breathe or think and really, it feels like too much but he – he doesn’t know.

He doesn’t say no either.

He doesn’t say no when Brendon’s red parka drops to the ground, doesn’t say no when he unbuttons his shirt and then his jeans and doesn’t say anything when Brendon crawls between his legs and presses his hips down hard.

It’s over in a rush.

Maybe it didn’t happen in one. He remembers Brendon’s mouth against his jaw, his teeth catching every now and them, his hands between their bodies – but afterwards, afterwards when his breath is quick and un-catch-able it feels like…

Too much.

Too much skin. Breath too hot. Burning. Scolding flesh from bone. Hands too close, touching too much. Reaching and prying and pulling at every stitch left. It doesn’t feel like sex. Not really. It feels like having his ribs broken open with Brendon’s bare hands and having all his innards shoved aside as Brendon makes himself at home.

Then it was over.

It’s over so quickly. Just a rush. Kiss then come. A few things in between. Skin, too much skin, bone and mouths leaving marks. A few sounds, words, sensations. Started and finished just as quickly. He gasps for breath. His lungs almost rattle.

He rolls to his side.

Brendon lets him.

Spencer can’t close his eyes until he can and then it’s morning.

They do it all over again that night and the next one and the one after that. It’s over before it begins every time. Hands and dicks and mouths and Brendon desperately pawing at his flesh. Pushing himself inside without waiting; biting and moving too hard, with too much force. Leaving dark bruises and split lips and angry red scratches in his wake.

Spencer can’t bring himself to touch Brendon afterwards.

And Brendon… and…

Spencer doesn’t even know why he’s here. Or how.

He doesn’t know anything.

Spencer wishes he could have talked to Brendon before. Before what happened on the bus, before they started whatever they started here in London. He wishes he could have talked to him. Tried to get some sort of understanding out of him before.

Now it, everything, feels too fragile. And Spencer doesn’t want to break that. He’s not good with words. He hardly has any left, and Brendon, Brendon with his red parka and mittens and asshole doe eyes is clumsy and sweet but rude and everything feels like it’s a moment away from falling to pieces.

It’s easier to keeps his jaw locked.

 

 

Agyness does not get Brendon. Not in a callous way, or anything akin to that. She just doesn’t get caught up in him and all his Brendon-ness. She does not watch Disney and she does like wearing fur (even though she feels guilty about it, and even then mostly because she knows she should be rather than because truly she is) and they are different in all the ways that count when it comes to Agyness – Brendon relations. Except one. Which might be him. Or flea markets.

Spencer sees her watching him sometimes, like a cat would a mouse.

She’s not like that though. He knows her. He does.

It’s just the others don’t.

There is static now. The comfortable complacency of the days dissolves. The late mornings stay, but the days of fucking around in the studio become something – Spencer does not know. His head aches. He fumbles when he tries the piano. The sound startles him. He can’t bring himself to try again until the next day.

“You could say something,” Agyness suggests in the afternoon. “If you want, if that’s too much, I could instead.”

Spencer pulls at a loose thread on the sleeve of his jumper.

She puts her hand on top of his.

Spencer wastes the rest of the afternoon.

At nights, Brendon follows them out to the same old clubs and bars and events. He talks too much and not enough. Cheeks stained red by the heat and free drinks. Spencer thinks some of the people make fun of Brendon, he thinks some don’t. Dark eyes and careless thrown away lines are overheard between songs and drinks. All pretty promises and forgettable words.

When the night ends though, as they all do sooner or later, Brendon follows them home in his tight black jeans and stupid colourful t-shirts. Always. And when they get back to Agyness’, Brendon follows Spencer up to the guest room and then follows the curve of Spencer’s neck up to his jaw with his mouth. His fingertips flutter against Spencer’s throat.

A sound escapes Spencer’s mouth.

It isn’t Brendon’s name, but Brendon reacts as if it was.

He pulls and presses their bodies together. Limbs and teeth clatter together. Spencer struggles to breathe; to catch up, to keep up. He doesn’t do either. His skin feels too hot and too tight. Brendon pushes him back against the crisp white sheets; lush mouth bruised and fingers leaving others scatter across Spencer’s shoulders, hips and wrists. He keeps going until they are breathless and useless and spent.

Every night repeats itself.

Teeth and fingers digging bruises into knees that need to be pried apart. Darkdarkdark eyes, teeth and tongues and heattoohot bodies. Crash and fall (apart). Repeat and repeat over and over until there is no air left in either set of lungs. Until there is nothing left but ruined sheets and an afterwards.

Days of not knowing what to do with himself pass one by one. Nights made up of different things do as well. Until one day, one not particularly notable day, Gemma finishes filming her first role in The Black Balloon and Spencer realises what he has been doing.

It’s around two when Spencer stumbles out into the kitchen to find Agyness already up.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he tells her.

She nods, her blueblueblue eyes a little tired, a little worn, a little too much unlike what they should look like.

“In an hour it’ll be nine o’clock where Albert is,” she tells him, and she leaves it at that.

Spencer nods. He can leave it at that too. Taking the cup of lukewarm coffee from her hands, he starts making a new pot. Filling up the coffee machine he glances out the window into her garden. It is still so dark. Spencer can’t see a thing.

Agyness shifts her weight a little and rests her chin on his shoulder.

Spencer releases the breath he had not known he’d been holding. “I need to go to New York.”

Agyness nods a little.

“Yes,” she tells him. “You do.”

There is an edge of reproach to her voice.

Gemma is her friend.

Spencer… Spencer feels all the things he should.

 

 

Spencer flies to New York on a Friday morning.

He arrives five hours later and gets to her apartment before it’s dark.

Together he and Gemma sit on the side of her bed with their fingers laced together.

She smiles.

He smiles back.

There may be tears in his eyes.

There may be tears in hers.

He leaves an hour later.

He doesn’t feel like the youngest kid in the room anymore.

He doesn’t feel like the oldest either.

But his heart feels broken.

He’d meant it when he said he’d loved her and he knew she’d meant it too.

When he gets back to London, Agyness doesn’t say a word. Not even one. Instead she wraps her arms around him and holds on for a good five minutes. She kissed his temple before letting go. Her huge blueblueblue eyes look at him and he looks right back at her with his matching eyes. Spencer doesn’t have words for what it meant to him.

“It’s going to be okay,” she whispers. “For Gem too. I promise.”

He thinks he might believe her, but not today.

 

 

Spencer is used to breathing Ryan’s exhaled air, more than he is the smoke of London but when Ryan calls the next day it hits Spencer and leaves him frozen.

“What are you doing?” Ryan whispers, his voice low and confused.

Spencer has no answer.

“You don’t even know Agyness.”

“She’s my friend,” he answers.

“Spence,"

“I…”

“Come home.”

Spencer pauses before responding; heart and head and every single part of him heavy and worn and so very broken.

“No.”

The sound of his mobile ringing again at around six am wakes him.

“Ulysses.”

Spencer blinks. Albert waits. But not for too long.

“I have a friend who needs a drummer. Want to go to Paris?”

 

 

**_Part four: Paris._ **

 

 

Spencer takes pains to explain to Agyness over the phone that he’s been to Paris before as the train rockets under the English Channel. But this is different. He had been on tour before. He’d been moving from place to place so quickly he never got time to see anything.

“Why don’t you see stuff now?”

He shrugs. He knows she can’t see him do that. But that doesn’t stop him from doing it.

“I’ve got Fashion Week in New York. You don’t need to worry about me.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You so were.”

 

 

The guy who picks him up from the Gare du Nord International station is lanky, with messy dark hair. He introduces himself as Zach Condon and that is about it. Apart from his smile. He has a really great smile. Open. Bright. Spencer likes it.

Zach, it seems, is like Albert. Because Zach knows people. A lot of them. Most of them are musicians and together they get drunk then perform something on a stage. Some stage which is in some café or someplace and then outside somewhere else.

Zach has this way of playing music. It’s almost as if when he starts, he can’t imagine stopping and when Spencer kicks in with the snare drum it feels like he’s breathing. It feels like life. They and the others, all these musicians (some Spencer knows, some he doesn’t) sway side to side and smile and close their eyes and Zach’s ethereal voice just rises above them all.

It’s better than almost anything in the entire world.

Spencer can’t see straight for hours afterwards. His hands itch to play and keep playing all through the night. A couple of the other musicians catch his gaze and even though none of them really speak English and he defiantly doesn’t speak French, they grin because it is the same for them too.

As the night becomes the day a few of the musicians that Zach seems to know better than the others take him and Spencer to a place that somebody owns and offer him a couch which he ends up giving to Zach, because man, his wrists look like they’re made of bird bones they’re that fragile.

The next day Spencer wakes late in the afternoon hung-over and with a crick in his neck. And back. And shoulders. Because, apparently he’s old. Wincing, he tries to stretch and then gives up when it proves more of a hindrance than a help with his shocking display of youthlessness.

Zach is up and about, abet still drunk and sleepy too.

“Mornin,’ Ulysses,” he mumbles, fiddling with the coffee machine in the kitchen.

After a few more minutes of fiddling, Zach let out a defeated sigh. Rolling out of the lounge chair he had somehow managed to fall asleep in, Spencer gently nudges him aside and takes over.

The creaking machine comes to life with a crackle and a spit of blue electricity.

They share one cup over the sink. Barefoot and cold they look out at Paris. There are dark violet circles under Zach’s eyes. But he yawns and stretches as if they’re nothing when he walks over the fridge to look for breakfast. Spencer can’t help but watch.

 

 

Spencer doesn’t really know Zach, he doesn’t, but he still thinks he’s never met anyone like him.

Zach is full of so much life, and Spencer allows himself to be pulled up and along with it. He follows Zach, like a puppy dog through Paris. They go to bars and cafes, parks and galleries and by the time they make it to the Eiffel Tower, Zach turns and asks with that same smile on his face, the one Spencer likes so much, if he can hear some of Spencer’s music.

“It’s not finished.”

Zach’s expression shifts.

Spencer thinks out of everyone he could maybe, just maybe, understand what Spencer said.

There are shadows in Zach. When he had performed the evening before he had burnt a little under those lights and when the cello player missed her cue he flinched as if physically struck. Spencer doesn’t know him. Or he shouldn’t. But he thinks he already does.

They go back to the apartment.

Spencer picks up his drum sticks and starts to play a beat. It isn’t one of his. But it becomes one. He remembers he’s alone when he starts to sing. His voice is still so weak. It isn’t anything like Zach’s or anyone else’s. After only a few shows Spencer knows this all too well. His voice does not swell and fall like an opera singer, it doesn’t fill with things that are more than sound and pitch like Zach's. It doesn’t fly or soar or anything like that. It creaks and fails. It’s rickety like a half fallen down barn.

When he chances a glance at Zach, Spencer sees him pressing the valves of his trumpet down one by one. Fast. Like scales. Or maybe like something else. When he leans closer to Spencer, his dark hair falls messily over his darker eyes. He looks like the sun and he sounds like that when he brings the trumpet to his mouth and joins in.

They play together that night and for three more nights. Every night his songs shift. Change. And by the third Spencer can’t imagine how his music will sound without Zach’s piano accordion or Zach’s trumpet part of it. Or Zach. Zach and his golden voice and his eyes that squint into the stage lights and his hands that guide and conduct.

“I want to record you.”

Zach looks at Spencer very carefully and very carefully raises one brow. “I record myself.”

His tone has a very specific edge to it.

Spencer can hear it and he can recognise it for what it is.

He shakes his head.

“For my record,” he explains.

Zach grins then, and it’s like sunshine. “So you’re making a record now? Really? A record? All of your own?”

Spencer feels himself blush.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

But that doesn’t stop him.

“Stop using so many rhetorical questions and come back to London with me,” he says.

And Zach does. He smirks, but he does.

They take the train back together, and then a cab. They each pay half. Spencer carries Zach’s luggage though. It sounds unfair. But Zach has a lot of fucking instruments that he carts around.

“Think of it as an investment,” Zach says as he watches Spencer lift them one by one out of the taxi trunk and onto the pavement outside Agyness’s home.

Spencer gives him the finger and tells him to fuck off.

 

 

Brendon does not like Zach. Spencer does not know this until Agyness points it out.

“You’re such a boy,” she tells him while they wander around her favourite flea market.

“You’re such a girl,” he retorts, but it’s weak and they both know it.

“You didn’t take him to Paris.”

“He didn’t ask.”

And he didn’t.

He had just nodded and then said something about sightseeing. Maybe a museum. Spencer hadn’t really listened.

 

 

Zach isn’t good at recording.

He’s brilliant and so talented it sometimes hurts just to look at him, but he isn’t good at recording. Spencer doesn’t realise how used to Ryan and Brendon he is until he endures two weeks of Zach recording and rerecording and rerecording until his fingers bleed, just to get something so utterly and completely perfect it makes Spencer’s insides ache when he listens to it.

Spencer doesn’t hear what Zach does. All he knows is that it doesn’t sound like Paris.

Zach doesn’t sleep and he hardly eats and Spencer, Spencer doesn’t know what to do because he asked for this. But not for this. Playing with Zach is light. It’s freeform and joyful and terribly easy. But recording with him is a process Spencer thinks tears Zach apart more than a little.

Finally, after Zach goes three complete days without sleep and two without any food that isn’t liquid form or cracker based he intervenes.

“You need to stop,” he says.

Zach’s eyes are red when he looks at Spencer; red and irritated.

“I’ve almost got it,” he argues.

“Zach…”

“No. I’ve almost got it.”

“No,” Spencer says. “Stop.”

Zach’s jaw twitches and his eyes narrow. Spencer thinks if Zach was a few inches taller and had a few more pounds of muscles this would be he point where they’d have a fight worth worrying about on their hands. As it is, Spencer’s only worried about Zach; Zach whom Albert sent him to play music with, Zach who has become Spencer’s friend as well as Albert’s, Zach who hears everything differently than Spencer.

“This is my record,” he tells Zach because it needs to be said. “You’re going to stop now.”

Zach’s face crumbles.

Spencer holds out his hand and leads Zach back to the house and into the guestroom.

When the dust has settled and when Zach actually slept, they talk and then together they finish what’s left of the recording and re-recording. It takes about a week. They work in four hour spans and take hour long breaks and it feels sort of like high school.

“I hated high school,” Zach mumbles as they eat lunch outside in the pale English light. “I dropped the fuck out as quickly as I could.”

“Our parents made us finish,” Spencer tells him.

“Bet it sucked.”

Spencer shrugs. Looking back, it didn’t. Not really. Not for him anyway.

Zach doesn’t push. Instead he tells stories about how he and his brother escaped to Europe and how fucking American they were and how embarrassing it was now to look back at it. Spencer doesn’t think he means it. He thinks Zach probably likes it; likes how fearless he had been, the adventure of it. Deep down Spencer thinks he maybe even likes how fucking uncouth he was, and how tactless and insensitive he had been.

Spencer listens and he eats and when they’re both finished they go back into the studio and work a little longer.

 

 

“Just us again,” Brendon announces the day Zach leaves.

He shrugs himself into one of Agyness’s vintage finds – a brocade coat that’s too big for him – and bites into an apple. His teeth look very white against the apple’s green skin. Agyness snorts. Spencer wants to touch Brendon.

He goes out into the studio though.

He thinks this is a day he can’t.

A few hours later, Agyness comes out to find him. Standing by the entrance she watches him as he tries to make something that sounds good out of Albert’s Gibson Les Paul. It’s been a week since Spencer started trying. It’s still touch and go.

Zach hadn’t touched it once.

His wrist, made of such fine birdlike bones, stopped him he explained. The words he had chosen – short, precise – sounded like they had been said before. They sounded as if they were another language and as if Zach were really saying something else. His sharp, sharp blue eyes had meet Spencer’s and Spencer had nodded and they had not discussed the matter further.

“Nick gave Albert that,” Agyness tells him.

Spencer fingers slip; the sound cuts into his eardrums.

He goes to put it aside. Agyness stops him. “It’s okay. Albert said you could use anything.”

Like a chastised child, Spencer brings it closer to his body again. Immediately he feels stupid. Agyness puts a hand on his. Her eyes are so very blueblueblue. His grip goes slack. He puts the guitar away and lets her lead him out of the studio – out of her home – and into the surrounding Primrose Hill streets.

Slowly they start walking.

They have no destination. Spencer knows these streets but he doesn’t see them. His hands, so useless, cramp in hers. He doesn’t know why. The weather is turning. The days are getting shorter and the skies darker. Their shadows are long against the concrete. Spencer tries not to look at them.

“You hated them,” Agyness whispers, everything about her terribly sad. “All the pretty girls and prettier boys that came after you, but you really hated all the ones that came before.”

Spencer feels himself go very still.

She squeezes his hand. Against the warmth of her palm and the strength of her fingers, his hand feels cold.

“I think Brendon wishes he gave you everything he didn’t,” she says. “I really do.”

The wind is very cold. It cuts through Spencer’s jacket and leaves imaginary abrasions on his bones. He brings Agyness closer and holds her tight. She stops shivering. He doesn’t know how or why.

“We should get back.”

Agyness smiles, and her eyes crinkle. “Yeah. Yeah, we should.”

 

 

A few months later Zach calls Spencer directly.

“I’m heading back to the States in two weeks. Come play a farewell concert with me.”

There is no answer but yes, but Spencer says another one instead.

Zach laughs.

“Fuck yeah I’ll come and work on your record some more if you come and play with me in Paris. But you better pay me with something more than gratitude this time.”

“How about booze?” Spencer offers, because from his experience alcohol was a universal currency when it came to musicians.

“Sounds fair.”

 

 

Brendon doesn’t come to Paris.

They argue without words. Spencer leaves without knowing the answer to his ‘why not?’ He also doesn’t ask it. So maybe that’s why he doesn’t get an answer. But whatever. The train ride is longer than before. He wants to sleep through most of it but he doesn’t. Instead he watches the other passengers. The mother and child three seats in front of him, the business man working on his laptop, the tourists. None of them watch him back. He arrives to find Zach waiting for him on the platform holding a sign with someone else’s name on it.

“I figured you needed another name.”

“What’s wrong with the one I have now?”

“Nothing. But change is as good as a holiday.”

“Really?”

Zach nods in that way of his.

Spencer snorts. “Well then perhaps I should have stayed in London and let Agyness call me Ulysses instead.”

Zach gives him a certain look.

Spencer can’t be bothered with that so he just throws an arm around his shoulder and lets him lead the way.

 

 

Spencer and Zach have sex in Paris.

They play until late, and drink until it’s much later and when they finish that, Zach invites Spencer up to his loaned apartment and into his borrowed bedroom and they kiss until their mouths are red and hearts are beating so very, very fast. When they stop, breaking away to breathe, Spencer smiles at Zach, and he smiles right back at Spencer and it’s as if they’re keeping the best secret in the world.

Like teenagers they tumble out of their clothes, all clumsy fingers and impatient mouths.

Zach presses himself against Spencer and it’s good. So very good and Spencer can’t stop smiling and suddenly everything about it is more than good. It’s fun and real and it doesn’t hurt. Zach smiles and laughs and Spencer feels whole underneath his hands. Zach feels alive under his and everything is intimate in a way Spencer has never felt before. It isn’t perfect. There’s no such thing as perfect. But it’s good and he feels alive.

When he wakes the next morning, Zach asks if he wants to go to the beach.

“The beach?” he mumbles, blinking the sleep out of his eyes.

Zach grins, slow and steady. “Yeah. We could catch a bus to the Seine and busk on the boardwalk down to the Paris Plage project. Walk in all the imported sand and sit under parasols.”

He says it all with stars in his eyes and promises threading through every word.

Nothing in the world had ever sounded better.

So Spencer nods, and Zach grins and they fool around once more before breakfast.

 

 

They play for hours that day by the banks of the river Seine, on that beautiful artificial coastline. No one knows who they are and at the end of the day they only have enough for a coffee or two but it doesn’t feel like that. No. It doesn’t feel like that at all. Zach hums a little while they drink it, and Spencer watches some of Zach’s friends flirt with the waitress and waiter and somehow get a dinner for all of them out of their few euros in the process.

Then suddenly Zach is looking at him, and Spencer looks right back at him and then they’re smiling again.

“Want to come to Mexico with me?” Zach asks. “This guy asked me to make a soundtrack for this movie he’s doing and I could really use a good drummer.”

For a moment Spencer imagines saying yes. He imagines following Zach from town to town, in buses and rattling borrowed cars and fuck, just having the best time in the world because it’s Zach. Zach who is crazy talented and creative and sees the world as something wonderful and painful and – Spencer could love him.

Maybe he does already, a little.

But he doesn’t say yes. Instead he shakes his head.

Zach merely grins. “Worth a try.”

Spencer shrugs and thinks of going home.

Zach lets him.

When it comes time to leave, he and the others drop Spencer off back where he started at the Gare du Nord International station an hour before the last London Eurostar train of the night and wait until Spencer boards. They laugh when he kisses Zach goodbye and he laughs at them when they wave and run after the train as it pulls away. Apart from the drunken tuba player vomiting behind the turnstiles, it feels almost like a movie scene.

It doesn’t feel anything like a goodbye.

He sleeps on the train ride back. He sleeps and he sleeps and he folds his bag against him like a pillow. When he wakes, he’s back in London and the sky is mostly dark with only a hint of light. He feels awake though. Awake and alive and perhaps a little like Zach maybe did all those not so many years ago when he first stepped off the train to Paris.

He catches a bus, not taxi, back to Agyness’ townhouse and watches the city sleep the whole way. One stop early he gets off and walks. The grass in the park by Agyness’s house is covered in icy white frost and it matches the air Spencer exhales as he fiddles with the house key outside her door. His heart feels alive.

So does he.

Brendon’s eyes flutter open a little when Spencer crawls into bed and he’s so fucking beautiful Spencer can hardly find the strength to breathe. He kisses Brendon then because he can’t imagine not. Spencer kisses him and kisses him and everything around them is still and quiet and stained the palest yellow by the clear morning light.

“You’re back,” Brendon whispers when they part for air.

“I am.”

Brendon smiles and he’s so lovely, Spencer kisses him again.

“I missed you,” he says afterwards, and he says it again because he means it now.

He means it finally.

He means it.

Brendon’s eyes flicker.

“Good,” he replies, then he looks like he regrets it – like he should have said something else, something better.

Spencer thinks he should never regret saying things like that.

Brendon bites his lip. Sleep mussed and blinking in the weak dawn light, he looks so young to Spencer. Momentarily unsure and cautious again, his earlier boldness displaced. Spencer’s heart is full of so many things, all of it for Brendon. He thinks Brendon came to London for him. He thinks Brendon came to London for him and is still here. He didn’t leave. He waited and waited. Spencer thinks so many, many things.

Gently, deliberately, Spencer kisses Brendon. Light, feather touches. His heart racing, pulse fluttering. Brendon makes a small sound. The sheets rustle a little when he pushes them aside. Breaking apart, Spencer pauses. Brendon’s fingers tug at the collar of his jacket. Spencer shrugs it off. His heart races. Brendon’s smiling, flushed and youthful.

Spencer's heart feels so full and he feels so alive.

They’ve done this before. But it feels as if they haven’t. Together they fumble out of their clothing; fingers getting tangled in belt buckles and pyjama drawstrings, hands skating over skin, the cold of the outside world being brushed away and replaced.

Spencer takes his time to press his hips down against Brendon’s. Takes his time to kiss the hollow at the base of Brendon's throat. Takes his time with everything. In stops and starts he makes himself say everything that he should have said before.

Brendon smiles at him, and it’s like sunshine.

He says he loves Spencer too, he says he’s beautiful and that no one else matters and so many other things that Spencer had no idea he had been storing up inside himself. And when Brendon finishes, and they’re just about to get started, he laughs and Spencer’s thinks again, he’s beautiful and he says it.

The words mean something now.

So he says them again and again.

“What do you want to do today?” Spencer asks, afterwards.

“Bed,” Brendon mumbles. “All day.”

Spencer nods.

He wants whatever Brendon wants.

 

 

Zach and a group of musicians he knows and both he and Spencer have played with appear almost a week or so later.

They appear in drips and drabs. One by one stumbling out of taxies and off buses and borrowed rides. Two are new. They belong to Zach. Or to Beirut, Zach’s band. The girl is named Kristen Ferebere and they guy is named Jason Poranski. They are not like Zach or the Parisian gaggle of musicians, but they somehow fit; each steady and grounded where Zach is – well, not. With them they bring new instruments and news of Zach’s favourite brother. It is only once Zach finds out everything he deems worthy of knowing he sits himself in Agyness’s kitchen and makes his presence felt.

“You said you wanted to record us,” he says to Spencer’s face, as if it could have been forgotten.

Spencer laughs.

Zach laughs too.

The tuba player Spencer vaguely remembers from one gig in Paris asks where the promised booze is.

 

 

Bright and early the next day, Agyness steals Spencer for a morning of vintage clothes shopping. She loops her arm through his and together they walk up and down the cobbled streets, sometimes going into shops, sometimes not.

“So, Zach asked you to run away with him?” she asks him after a while.

Spencer hums and flips his way through a box of records.

“He asks you to come be a gypsy with him, to share a life and make beautiful music together and you say no? Colour me intrigued.”

Spencer looks up, briefly, and eyes her. “Liar.”

She rolls her eyes. “Okay, so maybe it would have come as a real shock if you’d accepted, but, come on, Zach never says things like that. Not to anyone.”

Spencer doesn’t look at her.

Agyness bats the back of his head with her hand. Spencer swats her away. She giggles and hugs him tight. He puts up with it. She kisses his cheek because she knows he’s a dirty, dirty liar.

“So, Brendon then.”

“Yeah.”

Agyness smiles. She has a really beautiful smile. Spencer tells her. She doesn’t take it as an insult, nor does she brush it off.

“Do you think Zach will really make that soundtrack?”

“No. He’s much too selfish for that.”

Spencer smiles and nods, Zach is.

Agyness picks up an old yellow and red tie and loops it around Spencer’s head. His hair is getting long again. She pushes it back with her fingers and he smiles and lets her.

“He’ll make something out there in the desert. Something so very beautiful. You don’t have to worry about him Ulysses.”

“I don’t.”

“You do. But that’s okay. It’s good.”

She turns to the vender than and hands over a few coins.

“For the tie,” she tells him as they walked away. “It suits you far more than it would anyone else.”

“Thank you.”

He means it.

 

 

Spencer spends most of the next few days with Zach and the others. Recording and rerecording. Fucking around with the drunken tuba player. Fucking around with music – some that belongs to him, some that belongs to Zach, and some that now belongs to both of them. Over the course of the week one of Spencer’s songs becomes a duet between him and Zach.

Brendon comes into the studio exactly twice.

The first time he sits cross legged with Agyness outside the sound booth, watching with huge nervous eyes. The second time he lets himself in and sits in front of the upright piano. The sound of it changes with Brendon’s body pressed against it; sound vibrations moving not just though wood but flesh. Zach eyes him, Brendon eyes him back. Spencer doesn’t tell Brendon to move.

He likes how it sounds.

Towards the end of the week, Brendon steals Spencer aside during a scheduled lunch break. Crowding him back into the house and up into their bedroom the moment the clock strikes noon. His eyes gleaming. His mouth sly. He tells Spencer that they just about have enough time, but they will have to be quick. Spencer laughs.

They have all the time in the world.

And they do. He kisses Brendon slow, with a smile on his face because they do. Down the hall, the others are gathering for lunch. As they scramble out of jeans and twist out of t-shirts and sweaters, Spencer hears Agyness in the kitchen telling stupid stories and Kristen try for the hundredth time to make Zach eat a proper lunch and the nomadic viola player dropping something that lands with a crash.

“This is crazy,” he mumbles against Brendon’s lips.

“Is not,” Brendon mutters back at him, but his voice is lost as Spencer slides a thigh between his legs and rocks into him.

Pressing his mouth against the curve of his neck, Spencer laughs, breathless and stupid. Brendon takes this as a sign and digs his fingers into the sharp angles of Spencer’s collar bones and pushs him away from the locked door and towards the unmade bed. Spencer let him and in the clear midday light, with all of his friends only rooms away, he and Brendon fuck not exactly quietly or quickly and when they were finished Brendon pulls Spencer into the kitchen and makes Spencer fix him lunch.

“Hurry up,” Brendon grins, all wild hair and smug smiles. “I’m famished.”

Reaching across the table, Agyness flicks his ear and smirks when he lets out a yelp.

“Say please,” she reprimands indulgently.

Brendon glares at her.

She glares right back at him.

Spencer rolls his eyes, and the others laughs.

Half an hour later they return to the studio, and then two days later they exit it for good. In their wake they leave a record. A proper, abet, still unfinished one. Loose ends abound. But there are moments, seconds of something Albert would call music – rattling chord changes, somehow muted crescendos, and odd almost uneven harmonies between his voice and Zach’s – that Spencer almost cannot believe he played a part in creating. He sends it all to Albert. Every last second and scrap of sound. When Spencer’s done he gets up, turns the lights off and leaves the studio. That night he sleeps curled around Brendon; the soft even sound of his breathing lulling Spencer gently to sleep.

That night he sleeps soundly for five hours without waking once.

 

 

On the last day, everyone wakes at different times; bodies strewn haphazardly over couches, armchairs and the floor. For some inane reason Spencer wakes first. Quietly, carefully he kisses the crown of Brendon head and eases his way out from underneath the covers.

Stumbling out of his room he starts making breakfast.

Around a quarter of an hour later Agyness joins him. Delicately stepping over all of the people littering her floor, she snags the first coffee from Spencer’s waiting hands. Tucking her head under his chin, together they let the morning creep past them; Zach stretching in the sunlight by the bay windows, Brendon drifting over and pressing a sleepy kiss to the crock of Spencer’s neck (before unsuccessfully trying to liberate what had been Spencer’s coffee from Agyness’ long wiry fingers), and the drunken tuba player drinking his way through the very last of the liquor cabinet.

It feels like home.

It isn’t meant to last, and it doesn’t. But Spencer doesn’t mind.

After breakfast all parties bar him, Brendon and Agyness, splinter off in a million different directions. Most leave the way they came; taxis and buses and friends of friends of friends taking them one by one. Agyness accompanies some to the train station. Brendon tries to say his goodbye’s at the door but ends up going too. While Spencer takes a cab to the airport with Zach, Kristen and Jason.

“Am I going to get a thank you in the liner notes?” Zach asks, twisting around in the passengers’ seat to grin at Spencer.

Spencer shrugs indulgently. “I’ll do one better and give you a cut.”

“Indy rock riches,” Zach muses, seemingly delighted. “I will be able to live for weeks off the royalties.”

Jason laughs. “Sounds like a good deal man.”

“Yeah,” Kristen chimes in, eyes alight. “Don’t fuck it up. You need something to keep you warm this winter.”

Later, when they arrive at the airport Kristen hugs Spencer goodbye, despite only knowing him for a week. She thanks him for looking after Zach. Her voice is soft against his ear and so is the look in her eyes when he pulls away. Before he can tell her that he didn’t, that it was Zach that looked after him – Zach pulls him into his arms and holds onto him tightly.

“Mexico’s going to blow without you Ulysses.”

“No it’s not.”

Spencer feels Zach grin against the side of his neck. He knows Zach’s going to make something too beautiful for words out there. He just knows it. And he can’t wait to hear it.

 

 

When Spencer returns home, he finds Ryan standing on the doorstep.

“About fucking time,” he bitches. “It’s fucking cold out here.”

Spencer feels his heart clench.

Ryan wrinkles his nose, then he pounces on Spencer and holds him very tight for a very long time.

They don’t say they missed each other.

They don’t really need too.

 

 

Ryan refuses to acknowledge Agyness for one whole week.

He doesn’t look at her or talk to her or even concede her existence.

Agyness rolls her eyes when she steals Spencer away for the weekly flea market adventure (this time also involving Brendon and Ryan who were at least ten stalls ahead of them and moving quickly onwards). Spencer doesn’t think that anyone, ever, has done anything of the sort to her.

“If I didn’t adore you so much Spencer Ulysses Smith, I might take offence to all the Yoko Ono allusions your BFF insists on making.”

“He’ll get over it.”

“He better,” she warns.

Two days and one photo shoot later, the ice is thawed somewhat. Mostly by the freebies Agyness gets sent home with. Or, to be specific the designer freebies she gets sent home with that she had no intention of using or keeping. Spencer would never call Ryan shallow, but he’d never been able to turn down Christian Dior.

Agyness wrinkles her nose when she see him.

Or at the belt he is using to keep his shinny new Alexander McQueen skinny girl-jeans from slipping down his hips.

“Why do I have to be surrounded by such skinny boys?”

Ryan pauses, and looks at her for the first time since arriving unannounced. “Maybe it’s because you’re fat.”

Agyness raises one brow.

“Maybe,” she replies in a very even tone. “Or maybe it’s because only one of us has gone through puberty.”

Ryan glares.

Agyness smiles sweetly.

“Whatever,” he mumbles, turning his attention to something else.

 

 

Slowly, very slowly, but steadily, time starts to pass again. Agyness takes them to events at night. She dresses up in her most ridiculous and expensive clothes and introduces them to people as ‘ _Three Quarters of Panic! at the Disco,_ ’ or some other awfully lame sentiment that involves her throwing her arms around them all and looming over Brendon in platform heels while getting blinded by flash photography. And somehow, despite the cameras and red carpets and fashion things that only Agyness, and maybe Ryan understands, it maybe feels a little like it used too.

Spencer’s been in London for a while. Most of it involved following Agyness migrating from club to bar to event to wherever the fuck they managed to end up at four in the morning. There are people he knows, or at least has met more than once. More than a few of them remember his name for some reason. But no matter where they are, at the end of the night the only people he’s talking to are Brendon and Ryan.

So much of what he had been in the beginning, maybe even recently, was based on Brendon and Ryan. He stood in the space between them, translating their words so that the other would understand. Acting as a buffer, the middle ground between them. Trying to find the compromise, or any, when they fought or were about to fight. Now, as Spencer lies in bed with Brendon pressed up against his side and Ryan against the other, he thinks it isn’t strange that they would crawl up next to him. Because really, back in that tour bus, even though they had been fighting and fucking and doing whatever without Spencer between them, they’d been further apart than ever. And when they crowded up to him, pushing him, clinging to him, it had been as much about them, as it had been about him. Ryan pressing his mouth against Spencer’s or fucking Brendon backstage before the lights when down, trying to get Brendon’s attention as much as Spencer’s. Brendon pressing his face against Spencer’s next, begging for affection when Ryan had cut him off from it.

What a terrible mess they were.

The thought echoes hours later when the four of them stumble back to Agyness.’ In smoke stained, day old clothing they take a taxi most of the way back, then change their minds and get out three blocks away from Agyness’ house to have an early breakfast. Brendon and Ryan take charge of that, leaving Spencer and Agyness to find a picnic table in the local park across the road.

The frost covered grass crunches under their feet as leave the pavement.

In strappy heels, Agyness shivers a little as the long blades touch her exposed ankles. Taking off his scarf, Spencer wraps it around her neck and takes her arm. Slowly, carefully, they walk away from the roadside and into the parklands. Behind them, the sounds of the city waking fades a little. But only a little, and only for a little while; soon the whole of London would be awake.

Claiming the first picnic table they find, together they sit and look back across the park.

“You were this terribly beautiful, terribly sad boy when Albert and I found you,” Agyness whispers after a little while, her eyes distant.

Against her side, Spencer felt small and fragile.

Agyness smiles though and laces her fingers through his. “And mean. This beautiful, sad, mean boy and when Albert saw you play he told me you were an engineer in need of a bridge.”

Spencer aches. He aches and aches some more when he realises that’s exactly how he sees her. Maybe Albert saved them both from themselves.

“I think I’m going to sell my house and move to New York,” Agyness says after a little bit of time has passed, neatly changing subjects and crossing her ankles at the same time.

“Change is good,” Spencer replies, looking across the park to the café on the street where Ryan and Brendon are ordering their morning breakfast.

“Yes. And it’s better for Albert. More central.”

Spencer turns a little. “Gemma lives in New York.”

“That she does.”

“Agyness…”

“I’ll look in on her. It’s okay. She’s my friend too.”

Agyness looks tried then, and too old for her age. Spencer loves her terribly.

“Everyone’s moving to New York,” she tells him quietly. “Gem, Alexa and Alex, Jules and Nick and Fab and Nikolai, and even Zach’s somewhere nearish to there.”

“I’m still here,” Spencer tells her.

Agyness looks at him tenderly, and pokes him with her index finger. “That you are. But you’re not going to stay here forever.”

Spencer can’t look at her. “I loved her.”

“I know.”

“I could have married her.”

“I know, Spence,” she tells him. “It’s okay.”

He thinks she does. He thinks she knows what it was like being with Gemma, and how – how he could have spent his life with her. It would have been so very easy. He could have married her and moved in with her and had children and grandchildren or maybe bought a dog or maybe bought two instead, and they could have just stayed like that. Or maybe they could have just stayed with her, and only her. Just the two of them. Him with his drums, and her with her golden smile. But he didn’t.

The night before last, Spencer had called home.

He called home and he spoke with his mother and sisters for the first time in far too long. One of his siters had told him Haley had a new boyfriend and from everything they had heard he was nice and they were happy. He talked to his father last. Then before he hung up, Spencer told them he loved them all.

His chest had aches afterwards.

Haley was the first girl he ever loved. At the time, he maybe thought he could have ended up with her too. Maybe. For so long he truly thought he would. He can’t remember breaking up with her. Can’t remember the reason or the series of actions that lead him to pick up the phone after months of not answering her calls, ignoring her voice, and to dial her number and break up with her. Break everything.

“It’s okay,” Agyness tells him once more, as if she knows this too; maybe she does.

Spencer sighs.

Together they sit next to each other and London is terribly cold this time of the year. Agyness is used to it and maybe Spencer is too, after all this time, but he holds onto her hands as if he isn’t and she lets him. He thinks if he met her before Ryan and before Brendon, she would have been his best friend in the whole entire world. He thinks maybe she is despite that.

“I so am not,” she mumbles, like an embarrassed school girl when he tells her.

“You so are.”

“I so am not. I’m friend number three and I hate it. That’s why I have to have Ashlee as my best friend.”

“You do know she actually has friends despite lip synching pop music, and being unfortunately attached at the hip to Pete Wentz.”

“Details, details…” Agyness waves. “Besides, she and Pete Wentz are just an uncool version of Albert and I.”

Spencer can’t help laughing. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” she replies, looking very certain of herself.

“You do know he discovered me.”

Agyness merely smiles in that enigmatic way she sometimes has the habit of doing. “So did Albert and I.”

Spencer feels terribly fond of her then and he hugs her tight.

“You’re like friend A to their number one and two.” he tells her, in a whisper.

She smiles the pretties of her pretty smiles and laughs. She’s so beautiful in that moment, so extraordinarily beautiful, that Spencer feels his heart swell up inside him with affection for her.

In a way she was right. About nearly everything.

 

 

Albert finishes his tour one Sunday and is home in time to wake Agyness on Monday morning. No one sees them until lunch, but even then Albert can’t tear his eyes away from her and she encourages him, literally glowing under his attention. Spencer thinks – no, he knows - he’s never seen her look more beautiful. He also knows she’s put up with him for months and months, so he rounds up Ryan and Brendon and takes them out around London so Agyness can really have Albert all to herself.

Together the three of wander around the city, not really like tourists but not exactly unlike tourists either.

Ryan takes them to Liverpool. With huge sunglasses over his eyes and a million and one scarfs around his neck, he leads them through streets that all look the same to The Casbah Coffee Club and talks them into being allowed to join a private tour group. Brendon shifts his weight from side to side while the negotiations take place. Spencer closes his eyes and lets the late morning sun warm him.

They continue the cliché with a taxi ride to 20 Forthlin Road, 12 Arnold Grove and 251 Menlove Avenue.

With an overpriced lime green digital camera, Brendon takes their picture out in front of all three sites (then takes more photographs with his sidekick which, knowing Brendon, get promptly forwards to everyone on his contact list). Afterwards as Ryan leads them on; his nose buried in a guidebook, Spencer glances back over his shoulders at the nondescript 1950s house. It doesn’t really look like anything special. If Ryan wasn’t there Spencer would have passed it without noticing.

The problem with touring is that it never really stops. Not long enough to blink and see the world properly. Too much can become a blur. Places, faces, almost everything if one isn’t careful. Some of the locations Ryan directs them to that day aren’t new to them. They played at certain venues. They stayed near places of particular significance. Some places Agyness took Spencer to without knowing.

It’s almost strange to see something, to really see something like it’s the first time, only to have it really be the third or forth time.

The corner of Brendon’s eyes crease when Spencer tells him. “Maybe those times don’t count. Maybe how you are seeing it now is the only way it matters.”

Spencer shrugs. “Maybe.”

Ryan rolls his eyes and tells them to hurry up.

 

 

A few days later, Albert and Spencer skip breakfast and retreat back into the studio.

They lock the doors behind them and when Albert turns and looks at the mess, a different mess to the one he left, he exchanges a smile with Spencer. It’s crooked and soft; kind in a way that only Albert can be. It makes something under Spencer’s skin settle and fall back from sight. Around them the instruments gleam silently, and the outside world feels as if it never existed.

“It’s good to see you,” Albert says.

“Yeah, it’s good to see you too.”

A smile plays at the corner of Albert’s mouth. Spencer finds himself mirroring it.

Then they sit down and listen to what Spencer made.

When it starts, the record, the sounds; instruments and voices; chords and notes, all pile together. For a moment they are so familiar they actually sound unfamiliar. But then Spencer picks up the drum line. Always the drum line. Zach’s piano accordion comes next. Backbone and heart beat respectively. And then the songs take shape around them, from them.

Songs of loss and guilt, love and heartbreak; they are like phantom limbs almost, part of Spencer, yet separate. They are not clever like Ryan’s, nor brilliantly simple like Brendon’s. There are no hooks or catches. Not to his ears anyway. They don’t sound rich to his ears either; they aren’t polished. But they are his. Not his alone – so much of them belong to others – but his in a way that means something.

He is proud of them.

All of them.

Even the ones that sound like they are falling apart at the seams.

Maybe especially those.

“You know what I think Ulysses?” Albert offers, not asks afterwards.

Spencer looks at him and waits, because there is no rush, none at all.

“You’re a musician with or without your band.”

And Albert smiles.

There isn’t anything more to say.

 

 

Neither Spencer or Ryan are morning people. But on one of the last mornings, they both wake early and sit on those Primrose steps and look out at the parklands Agyness paid so very much to be next too. Ryan sniffs. Spencer sips his coffee.

“Brendon,” Ryan says, staring them off.

Spencer nods. “Yeah.”

They don’t need to say anything more. After so long and so much, they both know it all. Brendon’s kind of an asshole. He can be rude and arrogantly and too self assured and so many other horrid things. But he’s so full of talent and he might be selfish, but when he loves, he loves with every part of his being. They both know that. They do.

“We can’t,” Spencer says, not wanting to say it, but knowing that he had to, knowing he should.

Ryan hmms and hums and takes another sip of his coffee before putting it aside.

His mouth tastes of coffee when he presses it against Spencer’s. Black. Two sugars. Spencer feels his resolve evaporate. He opens his mouth. Ryan touches Spencer’s tongue with his own. His hand comes up and cradles Spencer’s neck; index finger resting on Spencer’s racing pulse, thumb tracing the edges of his jaw.

“We can,” he says simply.

“Brendon’s not like us.”

Ryan nods his head. “Yeah. I know.”

“He can be shared, but he can’t share,” Spencer tries to explain. “We can’t make him try.”

Turning a little in order to catch his gaze, Ryan smiles crookedly. “Spencer, that’s all he’s been doing since he was sixteen.”

Spencer stills. Unsure. Words disappear. Ryan leans forward and presses his lips against Spencer’s once more. This time fleetingly. There and gone in the blink of the eye. His eyes are wide; a little nervous, but sure don’t break Spencer’s gaze. Not even for a moment. Not until Spencer chooses to look away.

He cannot remember why they stopped doing that.

He can’t.

Taking a sip of what was left of his coffee, Spencer thinks of many things. Of Brendon, of Ryan, of the future. He thinks about being fourteen, fifteen, sixteen and being so wrapped up completely in one person and of being seventeen, eighteen, nineteen and being so wrapped up in two. He’s not a teenager anymore.

When he finishes his coffee he puts the mug aside and stretches his legs.

Ryan does the same; he’s not a teenager either.

“We’ll need time,” Spencer says and asks.

Ryan touches his hand against Spencer’s. But only for a second.

“Alright,” he says quietly.

They hear Brendon before they see him; noisily annoying Agyness to make him coffee and nosily asking Albert about if he really knows Sean Lennon and if he really is going to work with him on his second solo album. Spencer smiles and Ryan rolls his eyes.

“It’ll be okay,” Spencer tells Ryan, because he thinks someone needs to remind him.

When Brendon finally appears – obviously disappointed with his failure to surprise them – Spencer lets him wriggle between him and Ryan. They both make a fuss; swearing and pinching and calling him names, but that only makes Brendon smile brighter when he finally takes his seat and inhales his freshly made coffee. Because he’s a self-interested little thing he doesn’t share any of it, but he does take Spencer’s hand with his free one.

When Spencer squeezes it, Brendon squeezes it back.

Spencer feels his heart press against his ribs.

Brendon’s not that kid that stumbled into his Grandmothers garage anymore – he’s so much more and Spencer loves him. He loves Ryan too. They might have taken too much from him at the start, but they gave it all back when it counted, and they both deserve the truth after being so patient, after letting him go and waiting so long for him. 

And because of all those reasons, this time, when he opens his mouth words don’t desert him.

“I always thought the band would break up.”

It seems important to explain. Maybe important to explain to them. Or maybe just for him. He isn’t quite sure after all this time. But he needs to say it. All of it. And there are no other people in the world that deserve to know more than them.

“Not straight away, but sooner or later. And I thought we would too,”

“Spence…” Ryan says, his voice soft and hesitant and somehow despite everything it makes Spencer smile because there is no one else in the world who knows him better than Ryan.

“It’s okay,” he says, because it is now. “I don’t think that now.”

He doesn’t. Not really. Or not at all. The latter actually. He thinks about the Rolling Stones some more and thinks about Albert and his bands and the LP he had somehow made.

“I really don’t.”

He looked down at his hands, and forced himself to take a deep breath. Then he forced himself to look away from his hands, to meet Ryan’s and Brendon’s curious gazes. He forced himself because he had too. It couldn’t be like before. It had to be different this time around. It had to be.

“We need to talk to Brent.”

They look away almost at once, but Spencer thinks that’s okay. They don’t have to do it right now. They shouldn’t really. Not while they’re in London and Brent is back in Las Vegas. They need to be face to face when they do this, and they need to talk and they need to listen. They need to do it right, because no matter what had or hadn’t happened, Brent was their friend.

Ryan nods after a while.

Brendon doesn’t. But when Spencer touches his shoulder, he makes a small sad sound of agreement.

Brent was Brendon's first friend.

Spence doesn’t want Brendon to lose that. He really doesn’t. But they can’t avoid the situation anymore.

 

 

The next day Spencer wakes up late. The morning is crisp but bright. Spring is finally upon them it seems. Stumbling out to the kitchen he finds Albert making Agyness and Ryan breakfast. His curly hair wildly askew and clothes wrinkled he looks like he hasn’t slept a minute. Agyness can’t take her eyes off him. Ryan rolls his. Spencer kisses both of them in turn. They mumble their hellos and swat his hands away from their plates of breakfast and mugs of coffee.

“No,” Agyness mumbles as he wrapped his arms around her. “Get your own.”

“Please.”

Agyness sighs and Spencer knows he's won.

“Oh, okay,” she not really grumbles.

Albert made a face as she hands his coffee over to Spencer.

“You were going to make another one anyway,” she tells him in what constitutes a very sensible tone for her.

He makes another face and she leaves Spencer’s arms to wrap her own around Albert. The look on his face changes; his eyes soften and his mouth curves into a sweet easy smile. She matches it with one of her own, and Spencer thinks he had never seen them look happier. Through the rooms and corridors, he faintly hears Brendon singing in the shower. It is someone else’s song, but Brendon makes it sound like it belongs to him.

Spencer loves them all more than words and sheet music.

“Want to go to a record store today?”

“That one we saw in Liverpool?” Ryan asks, only not really.

Spencer shrugs. “Yeah.”

Agyness hums a little something and Albert whispers something back. It is clear neither hear a word Spencer or Ryan had said. A trail of smoke starts to rise from the stove. Spencer takes over the cooking. Unsurprisingly, before breakfast is even served Agyness disappears with Albert back upstairs to the master bedroom. No one calls for either of them when they leave. Even Brendon picks up on it. Spencer thinks it’s about time she gets Albert all to herself. He thinks it all day, from Primrose Hill to Liverpool to Abbey Road.

He thinks Agyness deserves so much.

It’s late in the day when they finally give up finding the record store they had briefly sighted a few days ago and make it to another one. Or music super store or whatever the fuck they’re called in England. He leaves Brendon in the Country section, and Ryan in the Soundtrack corner. He loses them both completely an hour later when he tries to find them. It takes him a good half an hour to find Brendon and when he does Spencer isn’t sure what he finds.

He touches Brendon’s elbow in greeting, and is rewarded with a small, sweet crooked smile. “Hey, found you.”

Brendon smiles a little more, but his eyes fall back to the display.

“This is going to be you,” he says, pointing it out. “Right here. Right after The Smiths and Elliot Smith.”

Spencer looks.

He thinks of his record; the one he hadn’t really known he was making until it had been made. Albert says there is a bit of mixing to do. Some technical work. Nothing too involved. It should be finished soon. It will leave his hands soon. Pete has said something about Patrick wanting to look (‘ _Not to change anything SpencerSmiththeFifth, Albert Hammond Jr. is totally 100% the producer at the helm. He just wants to listen. Albert said something about his new album and sound and Patrick’s already worked his way through ‘ Yours to Keep’ and The Strokes collective corpus of work…_ Spencer had stopped really listening at that point), and something about branding.

“They had us in the bargain bin!” Ryan announces, appearing from no where with three copies of A fever you can’t sweat out in his hand, sounding completely appalled. “It’s been marked down by at least 70%”

Spencer glances at the red ticket.

(It was more like 45% but he doesn't say that, instead he says something different.)

He smiles. “Maybe we should make a new one then.”

 

 

 


End file.
